Up until today with the release of these 'graphs' the ARU has never indicated the situation was so dire. Their financial controller left last month and said the code would be fine.
Why at no point have they publicly said it could be this dire, had they done so earlier before London they would have had Twiggy earlier. No one knew it was this bad and no one seriously thought they'd cut a team because they'd been saying 'you can't shrink your way to success'
So we'll done ARU don't blame Twiggy. This sits squarely with you for your completely poor communication and lack of transparency.
No, but a number of of us have been saying _for years here_ that the situation was just this dire (as is today admitted by the ARU) and that accordingly the ARU was headed for a likely bankruptcy given the obvious decrementing trends within both Super Rugby and Wallaby rugby and the blindingly obvious strategic and sustained operational incompetence of the ARU and most if not all State RUs.
In fact 2019 was often picked as the year of the likely collapse. We then speculated optimistically that World Rugby would come in to re-launch and refinance Australian rugby aided by the active support of the NZRU to do so (the latter acting in obvious long-term self interest in so doing).
The idea today mooted by the ARU that the saving grace will be the $6m pa allegedly to be saved from a loss subsidy to the Force is woefully superficial and truth-masking (or self-delusional) when we have the unmentioned and larger darker truth of serious financial difficulties again beginning to emerge in the NSWRU and QRU and the problematic mystery of just how the thinly resourced VRU will finance obvious forthcoming large cash flow losses at the Rebels in 2018 and beyond.
Then we add to that picture materially declining Wallaby-related income streams as foreshadowed by rapidly falling crowds for all Wallaby home matches.
Then we add to that a structurally low income year in the RWC 2019 year and the clear fact that the latest TV/media rights $ windfall to SANZAAR (solely from UK pay tv) will not be repeated from 2020, with the likely outcome then being that gross TV rights income to SANZAAR from Super Rugby will thus fall very significantly compounding the ARU's multiple and simultaneous other income falls.
The vast majority of all the above factors is of the ARU's own making and 'blaming' one isolated Super Rugby team (which the ARU has for years over-sighted very poorly, blithely allowing the Force to be badly coached under the likes of Graham and Foley and generally run badly as an enterprise) and relatedly arguing that the ARU's medium-term solvency is somehow 'saved' by closing it down is little but schoolboy economics which can be seen through in seconds.