Grassroots hero’s hard-hitting manifesto to fix Australian rugby
Australian rugby is in crisis and one of the hardest workers in the game reckons he has some solutions - but will the people in charge listen? MIKE COLMAN reports.
Rugby
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You can’t keep a good man down – and they don’t come much better than Peter “Doubles” Daley.
Doubles – nicknamed after the fundraising system that he has used to provide over $1 million for grassroots sport in Queensland – is a legend of the club rugby scene.
A life member of Souths and the QRU even though he never played a match due to a childhood eye defect, there is not one off-field role in the game that he has not taken on, and done well, over the past 45 years.
So far it is a fight in which he is holding his own and Doubles is determined to make the most of every minute. As he says, “you only live once.”
On Thursday Doubles flew straight from chemo in Brisbane to the John Eales Medal ceremony in Sydney to receive Rugby Australia’s number one off-field honour, the Nick Farr-Jones Spirit of Rugby Award for services to the game.
The game’s hierarchy didn’t know what hit them.
Like so many others, Doubles is deeply concerned about the current state of rugby in this country. Unlike most of them, he is prepared to do something about it.
Knowing that the award ceremony would give him a rare opportunity to be in the same room with just about everyone of influence in the game, he wrote down his manifesto for solving the issues currently besetting Australian rugby, printed out 50 copies, placed them in envelopes and distributed them to everyone from CEO Raelene Castle down.
If anyone was in any doubt of Doubles’ views on how to fix rugby’s problems before the evening kicked off, you can rest assured they weren’t by the time they headed home.
Highlights of his document include suggestions on how to improve coaching and development and the establishment of a national club competition along the lines of Europe’s Heineken Cup.
“We desperately need to spend money on coaching the coaches in clubs and schools,” he wrote. “Seek the help of (coaching gurus) Dick Marks, David Clark and Alec Evans to write specific coaching programs for this area.”
He called for the reintroduction of a former QRU initiative in which students undertaking teaching degrees at university were offered level 2 coaching courses free of charge, funded by the Australian Rugby Foundation.
This would make them sought after by schools upon graduation, and improve coaching at junior level.
Doubles also suggested that sending an Australian Under 20 squad on a four match tour to the UK every November would be a much better development tool than “spending a lot of time on development camps at the Gold Coast”.
But most far-reaching of all is his blueprint for the national club competition, made up of four pools of seven teams each – 11 from Sydney, nine from Brisbane, two each from Canberra, Melbourne and Perth, one from Newcastle and one combined Gold Coast-Northern NSW.
There would be 12 games each weekend, including double headers and, as well as city venues, matches would be taken to regional areas such as the Sunshine Coast, Toowoomba, Townsville, Wollongong, Mudgee, Tamworth, Port Macquarie and Bathurst.
“We need to grow the game by taking it to developing areas,” he wrote.
And that’s just part of it. Doubles has plenty of ideas, nurtured and refined from a lifetime’s experience in the game.
You’ve just got to hope that the people in charge are smart enough to listen.
Originally published as Grassroots hero’s hard-hitting manifesto to fix Australian rugby