Wednesday’s rugby news has Hibbard’s trash talk, third-tier developments, McKenzie’s vision for Wallaby culture and the IRB possibly moving the Test season.
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Wales talk up physicality
Welsh hooker Richard Hibbard has said that his team will ‘batter’ the Wallabies, employing the same physicality that enabled the British and Irish Lions to run away with their 41-16 third Test victory. ‘We were physical, we battered them for 60 minutes and that was the end of it, they couldn’t survive after that,’ Hibbard said. ‘We have to bring that ferocity again.’
The starting Lions team for the series-deciding win featured 10 Welshmen, and Hibbard confirmed that the win had given the players a mental edge coming into this weekend’s game. But he also conceded that the Wallabies were a ‘different team’ under Ewen McKenzie, praising the growing strength and confidence of the Australian pack. [/one_half]
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Fans respond to hard-line stance
Ewen McKenzie has revealed that following the Dublin suspensions, the ARU has received an influx of requests for season memberships, especially from previously jaded fans. ‘People are actually going to re-engage in the game, take out memberships, as a result of off-field stuff we’ve done,’ Link said.
But McKenzie insisted that his hard-line stance was not a PR move, and pleasing the disgruntled rugby public was an indirect outcome. Instead he reiterated the need to build the professional culture of the Wallabies back to pre-2003 levels, after which the team has won no Bledisloes, no World Cups and only one Tri-Nations tournament. ‘We’re making a statement because we’re a high-performance team that want to go somewhere,’ McKenzie said. [/one_half]
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Third-tier is a go
ARU boss Bill Pulver is on the cusp of re-launching the failed ARC in a similar format, believing that it was a short-sighted mistake to axe the competition after just one fiscally failing year. Although the ARC lost $5million in its one season in 2007, Pulver emphasised that more patience was needed as the concepts behind the competition ‘were absolutely spot on.’
The new competition would be called the ‘National Rugby Championship’, or NRC, and would be an eight- to 10-team proposition running from August until November and primarily aimed at building solid rugby ‘pathways’ for young rugby players from Perth, Melbourne and Canberra. Pulver said he was ‘hell bent’ on establishing the NRC after having ‘gutted’ Australian Rugby at the ARU level, saving $3.5mill in player salaries and $2.5mill by closing the Brisbane and Sydney academies. [/one_half]
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IRB look to move Test window
The IRB are currently consulting representatives of the world’s major unions, worried that the increasingly packed international calendar is taking its toll on players. One proposal involves moving the fractured June Test window back a month to July, allowing the Super Rugby season to be completed uninterrupted. It will be interesting to see the ARU reaction, who recently agreed to an additional 15th Test of the season, necessitated by their financial difficulties.
The IRB hopes that an agreement can be reached in time for the 2016-17 season. Brett Gosper, the IRB chief executive, said it was important to attempt to create a ‘smoother co-ordination’ between the two hemispheres by drafting a new international season calendar. [/one_half]
