Off the bench: Wise up, guys - do it the Aussie way

By CHRIS RATTUE

We should have listened to Rod Kafer more closely.

The old Brumbies back seemed to be whistling a strange tune when he bleated about the Sydney influence in Australian rugby, and how the Brumbies had it tough.

The Wallabies, after all, are full of Brumbies, and coaches Rod Macqueen and Eddie Jones are hardly unfamiliar with Canberra.

But Kafer, who has made a bundle on the markets, deals in the future. He knew that in Australian sports you trust no one and never give suckers an even break - even if you have got a foot on their throat.

Which, for a quick translation, means that while we appear to have lost the World Cup because of our dirty stadiums, we really lost it because our administrators are naive.

While our blokes thought the Super 12 dispute was a bit of enthusiastic sparring at the local gym, as soon as we landed a little punch on the Aussie chin they turned into Earnie Shavers.

This is the way with Australian sport. If you turn up chumps at an Olympic Games you immediately plough squillions of dollars into sport which makes winning those little shiny things a tad easier.

If your league team of legends gets belted by the Kiwis, you dump Wally Lewis and Co and get in blokes who will get the job done.

If you need to win a cricket game by rolling the ball along the ground, just do it and act a bit remorseful 20 years later.

It works like this across the Tasman. If you can't beat them, annihilate them instead. This is hard-nosed street fighting stuff. They're a nation full of lineout-diving Andy Hadens, and proud of it.

We should have seen the World Cup Shavers punch coming.

When cricket got boring, some Australians created the World Series, had automatic entry rights, and made sure one of the other two teams representing the world couldn't beat an egg with a pneumatic drill. In this case we should be grateful, because cricket would probably be a dead duck without it.

When it came to lining up in a rugby league test, they had nifty ways of making some Kiwis unavailable ... hardly surprising when we were trying to pick characters such as the Canberra Coathangers John Lomax and Quentin Pongia.

But it wasn't just the judicial committee that gave our selectors a hard time.

And when Ken Arthurson ran world rugby league, he also ran Australian rugby league. And when he ran Australian rugby league, he was still a Manly man through and through. When Ken ran everything in rugby league, if you wanted to get him on a Friday you had to ring his office at Manly. And Manly and Australia never seemed to have much trouble getting things done.

There are other case studies. Super League tried to nick the Australian rugby league competition off the ARL.

And they sort of did.

The World Rugby mob that tried to nick rugby, and in doing so created open professionalism, seemed to have its head office in Aussie hotel lobbies.

Super-quick or deadly spin bowlers who turn up on their shores suddenly develop wonky arm actions.

Everyone else in cricket is corrupt, but Mark Waugh and Shane Warne were just filing pitch and weather reports.

And now ... well it's the World Cup.

This is the Aussie way. And it does make life interesting.

So to take a leaf out of the Aussie sports book, here is a New Zealand rugby administrative mean team to let loose on an unsuspecting world to bring the cup home:

Colin Meads: Pinetree has a disadvantage in that he is a straight talker, which means a lot of the people he would deal with wouldn't understand what he's on about. But he is a legend, which is a great start.

As a player, he got plenty of mileage out of his bite being worse than his bark.

And he was held in particularly high regard in Wales, the home of IRB wallah Vernon Pugh.

It's a how-to-win-friends-and-influence-people selection, with a hard edge to it.

Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen: The one-time master of self-interest, with Kiwi roots and Aussie training. If he'd been working for us already, we would not only have this World Cup, but the next 10 as well. An absolute wizard when it comes to working out the proper way to organise voting systems.

Sir Michael Fay: If we could get hold of his Swiss number (phone number that is) he would surely lend a hand.

Sir Mike seemed to like all those close-to-the-wind international dealings during the America's Cup.

And when it comes to his money deals, whatever chaos seems to be around Sir Mike's side always ends up smiling.

Jim Anderton: The backstop. If we still don't make any headway, the Deputy PM will mastermind the forming of another World Cup which we, of course, will join.

If you keep doing this long enough, your cup will eventually become the cup and you can hold it wherever you like.

Charlie Dempsey: Our Mr Soccer, who really knows what world sports dealings are all about and is another master of the vote.

Charlie understands that air points are a valuable indication of success, because they reflect the number of influential hands you've shaken around the globe.

If Charlie had been running New Zealand rugby, that academy thing in Palmerston North would be called the Vernon Pugh High Performance Excellence Centre of Wonderfulness. And we would still be a World Cup co-host.

Vernon Pugh: An obvious choice, the trouble being that John O'Steal has already got him in the Aussie team. (What's the money on the Aussie boss trying to become the IRB boss?)

Footnote: Nathan Astle. I know he's got nothing to do with rugby's World Cup, but it would be pretty hard to write a sports column this week without mentioning his name after that piece of sporting genius against England. How on earth did he do that?