Rugby Australia to offer an FA Cup-style tournament to potential broadcasters
Rugby Australia could end up with an FA Cup-style national club competition running in unison with the NRC next season.
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Rugby Australia could end up with an FA Cup-style national club competition running in unison with the National Rugby Championship next season as it attempts to work out how to attract fans to its third tier while still keeping it meaningful from a high-performance perspective.
Broadcasters have made it clear that from the viewpoint of generating fan engagement, interest ranges down from the Wallabies to Super Rugby to a third tier which they see as club rugby.
So while RA is endeavouring to reorganise its rugby calendar to take in a national club competition of some description, it also has an ongoing responsibility to the entire game to ensure that the NRC’s proven capacity to develop players for Test and Super Rugby is not lost.
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That explains why RA has chosen not to go to broadcasters with a neat, signed-off package of club football. If it had fully engaged with its member unions and clubs on a model of club rugby only to find that the chosen broadcaster was not interested in that format, it would have been a case of the national body over-promising and underdelivering.
Instead, it will present a range of possible competition formats — the FA Cup-style proposal is one of about 17 ideas it intends taking to broadcasters — and allowing its chosen broadcaster to have a seat at the table to design a competition that will meet its needs.
It is a rare case of a sporting body reverse-engineering a competition to suit a broadcaster. The problem arises if the broadcaster opts for a competition based solely around the best-performing clubs in the respective Shute Shield and Hospitals Cup premierships in Sydney and Brisbane.
Certainly in talks that it has already held with Fox Sports, the strong preference was to tap into the tribalism that only comes with having had, in some cases, more than 100 years of intense rivalry. In other words, for the established clubs of Sydney and Brisbane.
In that event, RA chief executive Raelene Castle would have a major problem on her hands. Canberra, Melbourne and Perth have a valid complaint that any national club championship that does not contain them is illegitimate.
Indeed, since news of the planned overhaul broke this week, Townsville has also made it clear that it too wants a club in the proposed new competition. And it is fair to say that other cities like Newcastle and the Gold Coast will soon be lobbying as well.
It could be that an FA Cup-style knockout competition, conducted on a regional basis in the preliminary rounds could soon cut the national club competition down to a manageable size.
But another solution would be to give the broadcasters what they apparently want while continuing to fund an ongoing NRC competition that would meet the high-performance needs of a Brad Thorn, Dan McKellar, Dave Wessels and Rob Penney and, ultimately, those of Wallabies coach Dave Rennie.
There are all manner of logistical problems to resolve, starting with the question of who in a dispute would have the services of a certain player — his club or his NRC side?
There would, as well, be the problems of transporting both NRC and club sides around the country. And then there are the nuts-and-bolts problem of clubs like GPS. At what point in time does their rugby ground revert to the Valleys Cricket Club?
The most fundamental difficulty of all might be to ensure that the new competition does not produce “have” and “have not” clubs.
The Brisbane competition is well constructed on even lines but that is not the case with the Shute Shield. And the problem could even manifest itself as a safety concern — where a young prop might find himself facing a Test front-rower from a wealthy Sydney club.
Originally published as Rugby Australia to offer an FA Cup-style tournament to potential broadcasters