ARU moves to kill off club player payments: A 3rd tier, club rugby and the $60k persuader

[Inside Shoulder]

Has everyone forgotten the lobbying Sydney Uni did to be permitted to standalone in the ARC? Wennerbom et al appearing on the Rugby Club? Their progress since has, IMO, been directed toward being in the right place at the right time - when the 3rd tier is announced: they have a good case that they have been prosecuting for 10(?) years.

In the past we have survived, and even prospered from time to time, on the back of a good Wallabies side

The haves will have to be prepared to make sacrifices for the have-nots.

Those Wallabies sides were populated by Brisbane and Sydney produced players with 2 exceptions.

Eviscerating the comps that have produced almost all of the Wallabies will not mean that Perth or Melbourne start producing Wallabies or even s. 15 players. Just as with Sydney and Brisbane the production of s. 15 (and above) players must start with the u6's.
You cannot graft a Wallaby standard production line onto thin air.

The problem with Australian rugby is what happens under 20 years of age - clean that up everywhere (far more easily said than done, I concede) and we will be world beaters.

 

[Dave Beat]

Has everyone forgotten the lobbying Sydney Uni did to be permitted to standalone in the ARC? Wennerbom et al appearing on the Rugby Club? Their progress since has, IMO, been directed toward being in the right place at the right time - when the 3rd tier is announced: they have a good case that they have been prosecuting for 10(?) years.

True BUT
They are different, I have commended them for making best use of their resources, congrats and they can still do that through the Shute. They are a huge asset for Australian Rugby and should be nurtured

BUT the fact is;
letting them stand alone will not strengthen rugby.
they do not have an U6 - U18 nurture and bring through, however they pick and choose the crop as they come out the end.
my suggesting not including them was to have their Professionally Paid rugby players spread and develop rugby in the area's required.
Very Very draft;
3T starts and played at club ovals so clubs benefit.
Shute continues under 3T
Work it out so the winner of the Shute is included in the Semis of 3T.

 

[Inside Shoulder]

Dave Beat I am with you.
I have no particular allegiance to any club, by the way.
I should have added that the ACT had produced more than its fair share of Wallabies in the past, as well.
There has to be a solution in which the top club comp is fostered and feeds "naturally" into the tier above.
Its the "naturally" that is the hard part but its the part that matters to getting some interest and making it sustainable.

 

[Hugh Jarse]

Something that one of the Junior Jarses said while watching Poppy the billy goat from Counties Manukau and her mates defend the Ranfurly Shield in the ITM Cup got me thinking and googling.

In the Old Days Auckland was the all powerful union in NZ rugby, so to balance things out a bit, the Lords of Darkness promoted North Harbour from sub-union to full Union status.

It seems that similar was tried in 1955 when a group of subunions south of Auckland amalgamated and were promoted to Union status to become South Auckland Counties, later just Counties.

Counties struggled after the game went professional, and Auckland was too powerful again, and so another chunk of Auckland Union was sliced off and the Manakau sub-union was amalgamated with the Counties Union to become Counties-Manukau Union.

Has Sydney Rugby Union become too big and cumbersome?

For the good of Australian Rugby, is there any benefit in taking a leaf from NZ/Auckland and creating two or three geographic based conferences out of the Illawarra, Sydney and Newcastle/Hunter Union?
The conferences play in their their own competitions for a home and away, and finals series and then go into a US type inter-conference playoff series.

The overall standard of play in any one team in the conferences will be lower than now, but there are benefits in having the "talent" thinly spread across clubland, as the "talent" rubs shoulders with the "untalented" and brings disciplines, drills, tactics, processes and practices from Talentland into Clubland.

 

[wamberal]

Interesting post, Hugh. But each of the Unions you mention is supported by a network of grass-roots clubs, AFAIK.

We need to maintain our grass-roots clubs, as a first priority. The upper levels are very important, but nothing, nothing at all, must happen to diminish our game's presence in the community, at the neighbourhood level. I want the kids who are not going to attend a GPS school to have an opportunity to play, (and watch) the game.

 

[Bowside]

I don't want to watch amalgamations of teams play - end of. Thats why the ARC failed - there needs to be history involved.

When it comes to third their, for me you either have top clubs each year from each state playing off in a post season (say top 5 sydney, top 4 brisbane, top Canberra team, top Melb team and top perth team).

Or instead we simply have a 5 state teams playing each other.

I still reckon the best proposed third tier was the 8 team model - 5 australian, 3 pacific island. That opens up IRB funding, an expat supporter base and 8 teams is the perfect amount.

 

[Bowside]

To clarify my above point, I don't want to see club teams playing state teams.

 

[fatprop]

Whatever the ARU do, it won't be acceptable to some of the club's. I tend to agree with the ARU, driving clubs to semi pro will end in tears, as will encouraging them to stay amateur



Sent from a tiny evil keyboard

 

[Hugh Jarse]

Interesting post, Hugh. But each of the Unions you mention is supported by a network of grass-roots clubs, AFAIK.

We need to maintain our grass-roots clubs, as a first priority. The upper levels are very important, but nothing, nothing at all, must happen to diminish our game's presence in the community, at the neighbourhood level. I want the kids who are not going to attend a GPS school to have an opportunity to play, (and watch) the game.

One of the strengths of the NZ System is that their organisation is structured along the lines of Club ->Sub union->Union(or Province)-NZRU. A group of Unions (or Provinces) own a Soup Franchise.
There is no separate club rugby pathway during secondary school years. It seems you play for your school, or not at all (benefits of the quasi-religious status of rugby over there) as a teenager. While there are geographically based School competitions, they seem to work towards an inter-conference competition to establish the Schoolboy Premiership winning team for the year.
They don't seem to have a separate entity to run the "just for fun" suburban rugby like we have in the NSW Suburban RU. Their Subbies footy is just lower divisions of the overall Union/Sub-union competition.

One of our problems is that in Sydney SS Clubs are sort of the equivalent of a NZ Club AND NZ Sub Union, and there is the tension between village clubs and School Associations, and the relative insularity of some school association competitions.

I concur with many posters here that attacking the integrity of the Club system is fraught with danger. Tribalism is what rugby is all about, and club loyalty is a very powerful motivator.

Dear ARU feed the roots and the flowers will blossom spectacularly. Cut the pretty flowers off and stick them in a vase or some other pretty wrapping and a week later you need to get some more flowers from a bloke that is feeding the roots with the required nutrients.

 

[Inside Shoulder]

They don't seem to have a separate entity to run the "just for fun" suburban rugby like we have in the NSW Suburban RU. Their Subbies footy is just lower divisions of the overall Union/Sub-union competition.

Which is what should happen here, in Sydney anyway.

 

[Quick Hands]

I don't know about anyone else but I am sick to death of people saying don't fuck with the Shute Shield because Sydney produces the majority of Super Rugby players. That's a cyclical and invalid argument. Firstly, we (Everyone who isn't a Waratahs fan) don't want Sydney to produce the majority of players, we want each state to be producing. That is the best outcome for the health of the Wallabies/Australian rugby. The Wallabies are the main product that fund rugby in Australia. Wallabies failing will result in everything below them failing. Secondly, Sydney gets the money from the ARU. I haven't seen a recent update of what the ARU gives to each state but I recall a couple of years ago it being something along the lines of 4 million to NSW, 2 to QLD and less than 500,000 to each of the remaining states (I have a feeling it was 200,000 to WA). If anyone has recent stats, I'd love to see them. How do you expect anyone else to develop players if you never give them the opportunity?

In my opinion, the Shute Shield is a mess. Sydney Uni are pretty much untouchable. Young guys who were developed by other clubs want to play for Uni because they will look good and get a better shot at higher honours.

What is the solution if no 3rd Tier competition is made? Put more money into the SS and Brissie comps? What will that do for Perth and Melbourne? What will that really change? Relying almost solely on the SS and Brisbane comp has seen us slide further and further away from being top of the world. We need something else, something different.



The Force will continue to be bottom dwellers until we have a squad of mostly Western Australian players. Over paying for Eastern States talent has got us nowhere and will get us nowhere. But even that might not be enough, you get your guys like Kyle Godwin who can go from U20s to starting Super Rugby without a worry but there are lots of kids with potential in WA who need an option other than going to Brisbane or Sydney to take their game to the next level.

Sydney is always going to produce the majority of elite level rugby players simply because it is a city of 3 or 4 million people, which also happens to be to place where most rugby is played. It's the same reason as Melbourne produces more Aussie rules players than Perth or Sydney. There's no anti-anyone bias in that it's just maths.

I agree that there needs to be increased resources for development everywhere, but the ARU doesn't have a lot of money to start with and has often spent unwisely on have-baked ideas and wasted precious resources. This is why in Sydney for example, the ARU/NSWRU have abdicated many of their responsiblities for development to the private schools - it save them money and effort. The results being that the game has never expanded as Sydney has expanded. Take the current discussion on Wallaby front row play - the schools have no real interest in producing props to win test matches, they want boys who can help them win GPS 1sts - so we have lots of guys who are "good around the park" but can't scrum.

Yes, people will have to compromise, but dragging down the best performing clubs won't advance anything.

Very few people are against a 3rd tier, it's just that the ARU frequently come out with plans which aren't well-thought out and lack proper consultation so therefore are opposed.

 

[Quick Hands]

If I could offer a suggestion to the ARU. Have a look at what works in other rugby playing countries - not New Zealand, it's unique in terms of rugby, whatever model they used there would work because of the culture. I'd suggest France as the country to look at - it is probably the closest to Australia. Rugby is not the major winter football code and while rugby is played across the country, it is really concentrated in the south-west much like it's concentrated in the north and east of Sydney and parts of Brisbane here. It is also geographically bigger than NZ, SA, UK, although not as big as Aust. It has a multi-tiered club structure involving national leagues and geographically based leagues.

I'd also look at the AFL and NRL models here and see what we could learn there.

Racing in and adopting a half-baked, poorly planned and implemented 3rd tier is worse than not having one at all. It would be doomed to fail, cost money and probably give players little that they couldn't already find in SS. The less said about the return to amateurism the better - assuming that they could ever enforce it, it would be laughed out of the courts at the first challenge as being an unreasonable restraint of trade.

 

[Hugh Jarse]

The Clubs are also full of very wise people with long memories who have been there and done that several times over.

They know all the reasons why the latest scheme dreamed up by some marketing whizz kid graduate intern with a head full of theory and a vast array of spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations with graphs and charts in lots of colours, will not work because it didn't work the last couple of times that it was tried by the previous batches of interns.

 

[p.Tah]

The Clubs are also full of very wise people with long memories who have been there and done that several times over.

They know all the reasons why the latest scheme dreamed up by some marketing whizz kid graduate intern with a head full of theory and a vast array of spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations with graphs and charts in lots of colours, will not work because it didn't work the last couple of times that it was tried by the previous batches of interns.

I worked at a company like that. It was filled with industry leaders, but it had developed a culture of saying 'no', we tried that and it didn't work etc. Everything just stayed the same and progress halted. When the old brigade retired or moved elsewhere, fresh blood came in. Without the blinkered view of what had been tried before they tackled the same problems differently and succeeded. The company took off and it became a bloody great place to work again.

 

[boyo]

I worked at a company like that. It was filled with industry leaders, but it had developed a culture of saying 'no', we tried that and it didn't work etc. Everything just stayed the same and progress halted. When the old brigade retired or moved elsewhere, fresh blood came in. Without the blinkered view of what had been tried before they tackled the same problems differently and succeeded. The company took off and it became a bloody great place to work again.

Was it headed by a bloke called Tony?

 

[p.Tah]

Was it headed by a bloke called Tony?

No

 

[Hugh Jarse]

Was it headed by a bloke called Tony?

WHAT - not the Liberal party?

 

[Forcefield]

Sydney is always going to produce the majority of elite level rugby players simply because it is a city of 3 or 4 million people, which also happens to be to place where most rugby is played. It's the same reason as Melbourne produces more Aussie rules players than Perth or Sydney. There's no anti-anyone bias in that it's just maths.

See I don't know if I agree with that. Having a quick look over the Brumbies squad, I'd have thought less than 50% could be considered products of Sydney club rugby. To be fair, the Force are pretty close to being less than 50% Sydney products. Maybe my argument is a pointless one.

I honestly believe the Force are capable of sustaining over 50% locally developed players. That will happen a lot quicker if we get the handful of guys who are almost ready into regular high quality competition in which they are receiving feedback and coaching from Force coaches. The same is true of the Rebels. The Brumbies would also benefit. Jake White's intuition has paid off in spades for some guys like Jesse Mogg. How many more Moggs are there out there that aren't getting the chance.

 

[Inside Shoulder]

See I don't know if I agree with that. Having a quick look over the Brumbies squad, I'd have thought less than 50% could be considered products of Sydney club rugby. To be fair, the Force are pretty close to being less than 50% Sydney products. Maybe my argument is a pointless one.

I honestly believe the Force are capable of sustaining over 50% locally developed players. That will happen a lot quicker if we get the handful of guys who are almost ready into regular high quality competition in which they are receiving feedback and coaching from Force coaches. The same is true of the Rebels. The Brumbies would also benefit. Jake White's intuition has paid off in spades for some guys like Jesse Mogg. How many more Moggs are there out there that aren't getting the chance.

Do you maintain those percentages if Brisbane born and bred players are included?

 

[Forcefield]

No. I definitely don't. I think we'd be 30% non NSW or QLD. But that wasn't the point.

The Force squad currently has 13% local players (more if EPS is included). That's double what it was last season and I think it will only rise from this point onwards. I'd like the percentage of local players to be higher than that of NSW or QLD players in 5 years. If we keep recruiting from South Africa, that might not be such a long bow to draw.