SPORThttp://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/john-oneill-tells-aru-to-stand-up-to-sanzaar/news-story/d6a9b391faa6c7f51e63aaa563875973
John O’Neill tells ARU to stand up to SANZAAR
Former ARU chief executive John O'Neill. Picture: Regi Varghese
The Australian
12:00AM March 30, 2017
-
Former Australian Rugby Union powerbroker John O’Neill has insisted the ARU must stand up to SANZAAR and veto any proposal to jettison one Australian team from Super Rugby.
Although the ARU has denied media reports that the Western Force have been earmarked for eviction from Super Rugby if SANZAAR decides to scale back the competition from the current 18 team to 15, the almost certain reality is that the national union has fallen in with SANZAAR.
If broadcasters give approval for a reduced competition and South Africa vote to sacrifice two of their teams — almost certainly the Southern Kings and the Cheetahs — at their April 6 general assembly, then Australia would have to decide whether to stand up to SANZAAR or meekly fall into line and sacrifice one of its own franchises.
The Force have been identified as the prime target in media reports, but it is understood that the Brumbies remain on the endangered list. The Melbourne Rebels are rumoured to have escaped the gallows, primarily because, as a private equity club, it would be too expensive to get rid of them.
The ARU deliberately has chosen to be flexible throughout this process, to give it as much room to manoeuvre as possible, but the walls are beginning to close in and some hard decisions will soon have to be made.
Yet all indications are that Australia already has reached an in-principle agreement at the London meeting three weeks to cut one of its sides if the South Africans do, so any change now would involve a monumental backflip.
O’Neill, who stood down as CEO of the ARU in October 2012, insisted yesterday that the national union could not pass the buck to SANZAAR on the question of cutting or not cutting a team.
“The ARU is SANZAAR,” O’Neill said. “It’s an owner with veto powers. It’s their decision and if they don’t like what’s put up, then vote it down.
“If Australia loses a team and the ARU blames SANZAAR, then it’s a misrepresentation.”
Despite the best attempts of South African strongman Louis Luyt in the 1990s to set SANZAAR — or SANZAR as it then was, before the introduction of Argentina — it was in fact formed as a joint venture. Had it been a company, directors would have been obliged to act in the best interests of the company but a joint venture entitles “owners” to act in their own best interests.
The ARU has stated that its preferred position is to maintain all five teams but, as former Wallabies captain Phil Kearns said on Fox Sports, the ARU would need to “grow some cojones” to argue that Super Rugby remain at 18 teams or, more boldly still as O’Neill suggests, insists that all Australians teams remain and that the last three teams in — namely the Jaguares of Argentina, the Sunwolves of Japan and the Kings — be the first three out.
That would put Australia directly in opposition to the man who looks set to become the next World Rugby chairman, current deputy chairman Gus Pichot of Argentina.
Meanwhile, the cost — both in terms of people and money — of cutting the Force has come into focus with Bob McKinnon, chairman of the Future Force Fund, insisting that loyal backers who have personally funded the scheme to bring local WA players up to Super Rugby standards would simply walk away if the Force were jettisoned.
“I’ve been a rugby tragic since I was 10 but I would just walk away. So would so many others. And who could blame them?”
Currently rugby supporters give $500,000 a year in tax deductible donations to the Future Force Fund through the Australian Sports Foundation and the Force are hoping to raise that to $1 million annually to create a squad of 20 players. But all that money would be lost if the ARU abandoned the Perth club.
Breakaway Kane Koteka, on tour with the Force in New Zealand and preparing for Saturday’s match with the Blues in Auckland, was in the original Future Force intake of just four players in 2014.
“It’s a good thing they’ve done,” Koteka said of the FFF donors. “Because of them, they’ve given guys like me the chance to pursue our dreams. They’ve played a really big part in me getting to where I am.”
But Koteka said the whole Force squad was gripped by uncertainty and admitted that he and others were weighing up their options.
“I guess I would head overseas which is not good for the growth of the game in Australia. Heading overseas or interstate would be the options.
“It’s the uncertainty. You don’t know what the plan is for next year so I guess you’re always looking to see what’s out there and where you might potentially end up.”
That’s the danger. The Force are well on the way to having a highly competitive team, increasingly made up of locally-produced players thanks to the Future Force, but it could soon be scattered to the four winds.
