When I joined this forum, and up until this year, I was proudly one of the most optimistic posters going about.
This season, the Rebels loss tonight, and the fact that WSR appears to be potentially viable has absolutely convinced me that Super Rugby has nothing to offer Australia apart from the funds to prolong the inevitable.
Cutting another team wouldn't even help. Our best players simply aren't as good as New Zealand's squad fillers. People are overly idealistic - we can't return to the 90s. We're not good enough and the interest isn't there. Realism is needed here, and that involves taking several steps backwards to give the game a future in this country.
I'm currently living in Berlin and having recently moved here, I can't help but ask why the fuck I dedicated 2+ hours to watch a game of Super Rugby this morning, when I could be out exploring an exceptionally vibrant and interesting city.
To be honest, if I was still in Sydney, I'd probably be asking myself the same thing. I don't have the energy to watch my beloved Tahs get thumped by a shit Blues tomorrow and then sodomised by an incredible Crusaders next week.
I'm signing off from Super Rugby for the rest of the season. Burn it all down and start again. Bring on the NRC, 2019s WSR and whatever comes post 2020.
This is the thing Michael, people like me tried to temper your idealistic optimism and we were pointing out these facts to you. Now you can no longer maintain the optimism the backlash is huge and you lose perspective the other way. I have always argued that the potential of our players is as good as any other nation. What we do not do is train and develop our players. NO, ZERO, NIL, Australian player is better in core skill execution (excepting scrummaging props) than the day they left school. They do not learn the skills in game and training week in week out at a lower level to bed them in. They are then unable to execute anything under pressure so coaches in a short intense Super season are left with pretty skill less players, but still the best in the country, and have to dumb down the game plan and take no risks in the hope of being able to "build pressure". Part of its structure of contracting and removing the potential elite players from the Club game when they would be developing in depth skills, part is coaches being fed on "structure" by the ARU coaching manual developed nearly 20 years ago by Macqueen and then Jones and it is a safe fall back with unskilled players and a third part is a general fascination in Australia with KPI based assessments and being more driven by achieving obscure milestones that may or may not have any real impact on real world results, but as long as you make those milestones (which BTW are totally stats driven) results are always somebody else's problem and we end up at the Hickey/Foley argument that on the stats they won most of the games that in the real world they lost.
My arguments has always been with a limited budget and dwindling supporter base we had to retreat to a strength position and actually start fixing the base systems, that means skills are developed at the clubs, Coaches and Players. The NRC is not a development competition, it does nothing except waste money and social capital. It will be dead in another year or two, from both lack of funds and interest, because it is a nothing, no history no fan buy in and little wider support except from the optimists and idealists.
Change also has to start with the ARU board, that means that every single board member and executive must go. They have presided over the calamity that Australian Rugby has come to and their insular select from the carpark mentality has meant that this situation has been perpetuated throughout the Pro era, just like the Financial institutions with AMP appointing a Former Commonwealth Bank CEO, that bastion of integrity the CBA, as the new Chairman to avoid a shareholder revolt. How is that anything but a continuation of the corrupt system to maintain the gravy train longer, the parallels are so close it is amazing.
