Someone please tell me how this will play out.
Is there an Extraordinary Meeting of the ARU called?
If so, when is it? And will the office holders face a vote of confidence?
Is it likely that we end up with a new ARU that will go back to Sanzaar and tell them all bets are off?
THB - I have not seen an exact confirmation but my understanding is that a VRU-called EGM meeting will take place in early June some time, roughly 21 days after it was called.
(The ARU stated its disingenuously crafted 'we want to communicate sooner via just an informal meeting of parties' was cancelled for late last week for 'scheduling problems' as the reason - what a load of deceitful rubbish that obviously was; as if the WA and VIC delegates, desperately worried for their players and staff, would somehow not be able to clear their diaries for something that could aid these stakeholders understanding of the status of the culling process.)
My understanding is that a 'vote of no confidence in the ARU and/or its directors' will certainly not be put automatically at the intended EGM but only if the delegates to it are dissatisfied enough after the ARU updates in that EGM its 'decisive' Super team culling process.
I can almost guarantee that the EGM will result in little but some kind of confused and confusing 'communication' exercise - with the ARU mostly teetering on a little stool behind its lawyers' skirts - and that no culling of ARU directors will be either proposed or effected. (Note: I will be delighted if am wrong about this.)
Why - well Australian rugby, in any approach to real institutional reform, is almost always blighted by a permanent culture of and predisposition to what might best be termed: WIMPERVESENCE.
Namely a capacity for flailing hands, murmurs to the media, hand-wringing 'fears for the code', leaks that 'something must done', side attacks on one or two issues, and then.............when the moment comes to mount a serious, well-organised, determined public attack on a State RU or ARU or clearly needs to in order achieve real not cosmetic change...................nothing actually happens as a deep, well-evidenced pattern of deference and non-confrontation to elites within Australian rugby as a whole takes hold and everyone finally, post WIMPERVESENCE, just says 'we have decided it is best to work together constructively in the interests of the code overall'.
WIMPERVESENCE being one the major reasons the whole institutional framework for running Australian rugby is in the obvious mess of dysfunctionality that it is.
