Rugby bosses need to tread carefully over plans to televise GPS rugby

Like everything involving The Game They Play in Heaven, reports of plans to televise GPS rugby on Fox Sports won’t please everyone.

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Like everything involving The Game They Play in Heaven, reports of plans to televise GPS rugby on Fox Sports won’t please everyone.

While there is no doubt that the opportunity to show their talents on pay TV will excite the players and their families, there will be those quick to shoot Rugby Australia down in flames over the proposal.

The two complaints most often levelled against GPS rugby programs are over elitism and talent recruitment, and you can rest assured that the outcry will become deafening as the talks between RA and Fox continue.

Rugby Australia’s under-siege hierarchy of chairman Cameron Clyne and CEO Raelene Castle will no doubt argue that they are simply trying to promote the game at the grassroots level, but their many and vocal detractors will just as predictably claim that further boosting GPS rugby will benefit no-one except the elite schools themselves.

Nudgee College players celebrate a win.

“Where is the upside for us in Nudgee or Terrace in Brisbane or Joey’s or Riverview in Sydney getting their games televised?” a struggling local junior club could rightly ask.

And schools that already struggle to stop their students being “poached” to strengthen GPS First XVs could argue that the attraction of appearing regularly on television in front of an captive audience of professional club officials and sports agents would be just another carrot to dangle in front of their best athletes.

Not to mention the depth of feeling over the old school tie.

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While the ongoing conversation over the educational benefits of private versus public regularly gets an airing, when it comes to the rarefied world of schools rugby there is an equally strong debate over private versus private.

Cameron Clyne and Raelene Castle might be of the opinion that all parties associated with schoolboy rugby will be delighted to see GPS games televised each week, but if they ask an old boy of non-GPS schools Marist Ashgrove or St Laurence’s in Brisbane, or Barker or Knox in Sydney they’ll no doubt get a different reaction.

“Why should they be on TV while we’re locked out?” they’ll be asked. “Our 1968 Firsts would have beaten Grammar 50-nil.”

Nudgee take on TSS in Brisbane GPS rugby. Picture: Mark Cranitch.

To those not privy to the world of private schools, such talk might seem childish or snooty, but to those who entered it in short pants and will be part of it until the day they die it is no joking matter.

They take it very seriously, and many of them hold power in the thickly-carpeted corridors of Rugby Australia headquarters.

Right now Clyne and Castle don’t need another reason for people to be upset with them. Just last Monday a respected Sydney rugby columnist revealed a push to unseat Clyne by some of his former closest supporters. The onslaught of criticism aimed at the pair by former Wallaby coach Alan Jones in print and on air has been relentless.

If they are to make the plan a reality – and for it to have genuine benefit for the game – they will have to tread carefully and widen the parameters to prevent it being purely a showpiece for the privileged few.

Having GPS rugby on Fox opens the door to a televised national tournament involving the winners of the various school competitions.

For Associated, Combined Independent and State schools it could be a way to finally soften the great sporting divide between them and GPS.

And most importantly, any income from the proposed GPS deal must be used to help all junior rugby, not just split amongst the participating schools or tipped into the black hole that finances the non-performing Wallaby and Super Rugby programs.

Personally I would love to see schoolboy rugby on TV – just look up YouTube highlights of Kurtley Beale, Karmichael Hunt, Quade Cooper and numerous others in their school days to see how excitingly pure the game can be at that level.

But proceed with caution Rugby Australia. The last thing we need is yet another stuff up.