Rugby Australia: Full Dan Herbert interview on the state of the game
Rugby Australia chairman Daniel Herbert talks to JULIAN LINDEN about the future of rugby in Australia and where the code went wrong in the past.
Rugby
Don't miss out on the headlines from Rugby. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Rugby Australia chairman Daniel Herbert addresses the decision to sack Dave Rennie as Wallabies’ coach and replace him with Eddie Jones for the doomed World Cup campaign, the true state of RA’s financial status and why beating the All Blacks matters so much.
READ THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE
WAS FORMER CHAIRMAN HAMISH MCLENNAN OUSTED BY A COUP
“I can’t tell you why the member unions did what they did. They were pretty clear in their letter why they took that action. But it’s not for me to say what they did or their actions. All we could deal with as a board was the letter came through, we then had to take some action around that and then spent last weekend sitting down and discussing all of the various things that have been said and then the way forward for rugby.”
ENDING THE BITTER FALLOUT SINCE THE WORLD CUP
“We’re there to serve the game so I don’t think it does the game any good when this dirty laundry is aired in public. I always think that the nuclear option that you take is the very last resort. So I don’t agree with the way that it came about, but now it’s just time to move forward. We’ve got a lot of spinning plates that we just need to sort out and there’s a lot to do so that’s my focus.
THE CAPTAIN’S CALL TO SACK RENNIE AND APPOINT JONES AS COACH
“He (McLennan) certainly drove that and he’s on the record saying that he was the key driver in those decisions. They were socialised and that’s what he said. I would say that’s correct, he did socialise. And you have a discussion as a board and then whether you agree with that or don’t, you get behind what decision is taken. And that’s the same in anything, once the decision is made, you get in behind it and you support it.
RA’S IMMEDIATE PRIORITIES
“We’ve got a number of key appointments that we need to make. So the ($80 million) debt facility that we announced on Friday (November 24), that was a key thing that just needed to give us some clear air to go forward over the next couple of years and to be able to make some decisions and have that headroom. That’s now been done. We’re in the process of appointing a Wallaroos coach. We’re in the process of appointing a high performance director. They’re two key appointments that we need to make before we can then look at the Wallaby coach. We need to reform the high performance aspect of the game. And I say that with the community game in mind because the high performance game is the shopfront that people see so we need our national teams performing. And to do that we need to reform the way that we actually operate across the states and the national body. That’s going to be a key agenda item because we need to get moving on it and it’ll be something that will evolve over time. But we just need to get in a room and sit down and agree on how are we going to move forward in 2024 between the state unions and the national unions, so that that’s going to be my or our key priority.”
WHY CENTRALISATION HAS TO HAPPEN
“This will be the third time that it’s been attempted. I’ve been on the other side of the fence when Rugby Australia, or ARU at the time, has attempted it and it’s always the issue of do we trust you, do you have the capability to do it and is it in our best interests? So we’re now 15 years down the road since New Zealand did it after 2007 to their version then Ireland have done a slightly different way. There’s no one way of doing it. There’s no cut and paste that we need to take from here to there. It can be a different way, but the principles need to be the same, that we need to be working in unison. In the past, where it’s failed is around any of those key things around trust or capability or is it in our best interest. Now, what’s happened over 15 years, it’s been demonstrated that it works. What Ireland have done, what New Zealand have done, Scotland are doing, England are about to do it next year. So all of the big teams in the world are moving to a more centralised, united model and we’re working to the same system that we have always had. So we need to make sure that we can build that trust, the capability of the performance director and their eventual team will be key in doing that. And we need to get them in a room because there’s some really good talent out in the clubs.
“We’re not sitting here saying Rugby Australia has all the answers and this is the way we’re going to do it. We’re saying, ‘right, get into a room, here’s what we think the principles are. Now let’s get everything out in terms of what your fears are and what the reason that you’ve had not to support this in the past. And let’s just get over that hump, first of all, and then let’s agree on 2024, it’s going to look like this. We all agree that we’re going to do this in 24 and there’s no retreating from that.’ So that’s the immediate priorities that we have right now
around that.”
GETTING THE STATES WORKING TOGETHER
“I think in August all the state unions came out and said they support high-performance centralisation, so that’s on the record and we’ve said at the time what’s happened in the past is the national body goes out says ‘here’s what it looks like’ and then the states throw up on them. I know what the issues have always been. It’s trust, it’s capability, it’s detail, getting into the detail and the decision making of who gets to do this. So what we want to do is get everyone in who’s going to play a part in this and let’s have the discussion and we’ll have the discussion with the high performance director there who’s going to drive this. So we’ve got the capability. We’ll have the discussion with all of you so you can tell us if there might be things that we haven’t thought about.
“But we need to all agree on the non-negotiables and the Wallabies performing at their optimum has to be a non-negotiable. So how are we going to contribute? And that’s what New Zealand did. Everything had to be toward making sure that the All Blacks are going to be successful. And if that means that occasionally we don’t like a decision that gets made, then that’s the case. And coaches, understandably, with the rate at which we turn over coaches in professional rugby, I can understand the job security issues because they’ve got to win. So that’s where we’ve got to take that understanding. (Crusaders coach) Scott Robinson said to me years ago, he had to rest 12 of his starting Crusaders. And I said, ‘how do you feel about that?’ and he said ‘got no choice, I saw it as an opportunity to bring the next 12 through that”. So his approach to it was positive. He get to blood 12 new guys and imagine how good my squad is going to be at the end of the year when we’re competing for silverware. He’ll have all of these guys who have now got caps under their belt. And so he took this holistic view that it will actually benefit him in the long term because other people are getting opportunities. And we have to do the same. Because in the past we’ve had Wallaby coaches turn up to state training, turned away and told ‘you’re not welcome so go away.’ We’ve got to recognise the issues we’ve got we’re all joined to the same umbilical cord and this sort of us and them that’s existed historically. It’s right through the game, that us and them, it’s clubs and the state unions, the national unions and world rugby. We are at a point where we have to join to have any chance of maximising the opportunities that are coming down the pipeline over the next few years.”
SHOULD RA BE ALLOWED TO TELL PLAYERS WHICH TEAMS TO PLAY FOR
“That involves a conversation with RUPA (Rugby Union Players’ Association) because the players have a right over where (they play). If they absolutely need to stay here we can’t force someone to go where they’re not. But you know, again, we need everyone in the room discussing. I think we had one instance where the top four hookers were at the Brumbies. That’s not serving their purposes because these guys aren’t getting game time. And we’ve had that with halfbacks and five-eighths and different positions where you want that ability and naturally the players will see that ‘if I go there next year then obviously I’ll be more valuable’. But you want to be able to do it a bit more dynamically than that. We need our top players playing and we can’t have them sitting on a bench. So again, all of this requires everyone to sit there and agree ‘this is the model’ as opposed to Rugby Australia saying this is the way we’re doing it because that’s what’s happened in the past and it hasn’t got off first base.”
GETTING PLAYERS TO PLAY MORE GAMES
“There’s also the often talked about third tier or another tier of rugby. Our guys don’t play enough rugby, our girls don’t play enough rugby so what do we do to make sure... I think it was either Dave Rennie or Robbie Deans said to me – and they made the comparison between Noah Lolesio and Richie Mo’unga – that by the time Richie Mo’unga got to play for the Crusaders, he had played five times the amount of high quality games Noah Lolesio had because the schools don’t play enough and then they go to clubs, the clubs don’t play enough and then the rep pathways they’re not playing enough. You get better by playing more games, so we need to address that.
“It’s been tried before with the ARC then the NRC and it ticked some boxes, but it didn’t get the widespread support that you would require to keep running it. So one thing we want to look at leveraging is tribalism and part of the game that’s working really well in a lot of areas, not everywhere because it’s different region to region, but the club game in particular in Brisbane and Sydney and I’ve got friends in Perth who tell me the same in Melbourne and I’m sure in Canberra it’s the same with the club game. There’s a tribalism there that I think we can leverage off to build a competition or a crossover competition and that’s something we’d like to get into play pretty quickly next year if we can. But again, it involves getting the clubs in a room and sitting down and saying, “Here’s what we think, here’s why, and seeing if they’ll come along on that with us as well.”
HOW A NATIONAL CLUB COMPETITION MIGHT LOOK
“We’ve modelled this already. There’s certain iterations and also how long you go. Is it six weeks, it is eight, is it 10? because the longer you go on the more things you involve and the trickier it gets. You’ve got to think about the haves and the have nots. So if the top four from Brisbane and the top five from Sydney and one from here, here and here, what about those other clubs that don’t get in? You don’t want to create a have and a have not where the top four become a hell of a lot stronger and the bottom four don’t. So we’re sort of going through that but again we’ve got to consult. I’ve started to socialise with a couple of guys I know in clubland and they love the idea, but they’d love to be part of it, they’d love to sit down and have the discussion and ‘have you thought about this and have you thought about that?’ My brother runs one of the clubs here in Brisbane. They’ve done a good job.
“Over the past 10 years, a lot of clubs are stronger than they’ve ever been. They’re well run, they’ve got their own full time staff. Some of them got their own development officers that are out there trying to get the kids from school. So they’re actually doing a really good job.
“But it’s the professional game. I think the next level, Super Rugby, we’ve got to re-energise that. One of the things that they need to do is start beating New Zealand opposition. It used to be 40-50% many years ago, it’s now down around 20% and that’s just not enough. The NRL and AFL, 50% of their fan base is happy every weekend because their teams win but we don’t if we’re playing New Zealand and we play them in the Bledisloe and they’re just very, very good.”
WHY BEATING THE KIWIS IS SO IMPORTANT
“We’ve got them in our market and historically, the most successful sporting team in history. So to win half of our games against them, which is what I think the aim needs to be from Super level and from a national level, we’ve got to be a hell of a lot better. What we’ve seen with both New Zealand and Ireland in particular, the tide lifts all boats. So the national union performing well isn’t contrary to the domestic unions or the provincial unions. So Leinster, Connacht, I think are right at the top at the moment. Munster have won the European Championships in recent years. So their provincial unions are actually getting stronger so that success becomes a bit of a snowball. I think there’s enough evidence there now, whereas I think when previously this type of thinking had been brought to the table, it was new thinking and there was no evidence to support. And Australia historically has this combative nature between the states and the national union. There’s evidence now that we can’t continue to do the same thing or keep getting the same results.”
HOW MANY SUPER RUGBY TEAMS SHOULD AUSTRALIA FIELD
“I think five is OK. I looked at the data from when we went from five to four and back and it didn’t really make a big difference. I think there’s enough talent there. What we need to make sure of and this is sort of a holistic looking at the game need to make sure we can afford what we do. So we need to make sure that the teams are running viable or the clubs are running viable businesses. And as long as they’re doing that, there’s enough talent there. We just haven’t developed the talent because we haven’t invested in our high performance area for a long time because they haven’t had the teeth to do anything. So we need to invest in that area and develop the players. I don’t have any concerns over the amount of talent, whereas others I know would take the argument that you dilute your talent.
“We’ve got 150 professional players playing overseas, so I don’t think talent’s an issue. I don’t see it as you’ve got to get all the rock stars coming out of school. We’ve got to get better at that. We’ve got to get some more of those kids. But we’ve got to be more accurate with who we attract or who we go after and who we get, because there is a lot of competition with league and AFL and basketball and other sports as well but there’s enough talent there to get around. We’re just not developing the talent. So what we’re saying is go and chase that superstar over there who’s in a different code and bring him over here. And then they’ll be we’ve got plenty here. We just need to develop the talent we’ve got. All of those have come through. Doesn’t matter whether it’s rugby or other sports. More often than not, the schoolboy prodigy doesn’t turn into the best player. John Eales wasn’t a superstar at school, he got better after he left school. So it’s just having a really good eye for talent and how that can be developed and building the system to be able to develop that and integrate it with the stadiums.”
WHY BLAMING NRL IS NOT THE ANSWER
“We’ve got plenty of outside backs, in my view, and often the kids who go to rugby schools half the time they’re rugby league kids who just got a scholarship to go there anyway. So they say you lost them because they played at Nudgee or he played at Riverview or wherever but they were rugby league through and through. And a lot of the kids play both. Kalyn Ponga went to Churchie but he was a league kid who went to Churchie. He can play good rugby but you’re not going to get all of those guys. And they’ve got the choice. I don’t think we have to get them all. In Ireland, there’s Gaelic football, hurling and soccer. They’ve got plenty of competition as well. So I don’t have any fear that we’ve got the talent. My fear is we haven’t got a system that has developed the talent and we haven’t had a system that’s developed, the coaching, and that’s all within this high performance that I think in the early 2000s was there and even before then was there. But it’s eroded over time because they haven’t had the levers to be able to use with the game generally because, this federated model, a bit like during Covid, the Prime Minister says this and the state premier says that, that’s effectively what has been happening in rugby.
WHAT IS RA LOOKING FOR FROM A HIGH PERFORMANCE DIRECTOR
“Well, a couple of things. Track record would be good if they’ve done it before. Someone who understands how to pull a high performance system together and someone who can unite. There’s going to be friction, but it’s got to be someone who can bring people together, who’s got the experience and the know-how to do it, knows how our system works, but then has the ability to unite but has a very thick skin because there’s going to be tension and friction. But ideally it’s going to be someone who’s experienced in working in and driving this type of system that either exists in other sports or exists in rugby. But I do think having a background in rugby is certainly beneficial. We’ve had other people in the past who didn’t fit all that well. It’s got to be someone who is seen to be very capable, someone who can unite and someone with a very thick skin. They’ve got to be smart, but they’ve got to be prepared to put on a Kevlar, too, because at times it’ll take that. It’s not a popularity contest so they’ve got to have a thick skin but they’ve got to drive. They’ve got to be able to drive trust and they’ve got to drive capability so that people trust that they are good at what they do and there’s a number of those sorts of people around.”
SHOULD THE WALLABIES COACH BE AN AUSSIE
“My personal view and I haven’t discussed this at a board level, is it doesn’t matter. I think what matters is you’ve got to get the best candidate and the best fit for the group and the position that they’re in. I’ve got a lot of my colleagues and ex-players who have a different view. Soccer is an example of a global sport where you have coaches from all over coaching different teams. I know that stat that no one’s ever won the World Cup but it’s going to happen at some stage and has in plenty of other sports. At the Olympics there’s international coaches coaching all sorts of different sports all over the world and so they’ve dealt with that way in the past. I just think it’s insular thinking to think that it can only be an Australian to do it. If it’s line ball and it’s equal and everything else is looks like for like candidate and one’s Australian one’s not, then I’d favour the Australian, but we haven’t had a system that’s been developing coaches, so we’ve got a pretty shallow pool in my view of ready-to-go international coaches and that’s part of that high performance model that fell away many years ago and needs to be reintroduced. For the past 12 months, we now have a coach development manager who worked in the Irish system and during Covid came back. So we snapped him up. And he’s working with 57 elite coaches around the country currently. And he’s not a coach’s coach. He’s more. Working on their skill set and their IQ and what to look for in players and so forth. So they don’t see him as a threat. He’s there just to help the elite coaches. But that’s one aspect we need to be, you know, that’s one person. We need to build that out. So that’s where I come back to the you know, I think it’s, I think, preferable if you could find someone who was. But I don’t think we need to be hamstrung by that is my game. Yeah and that’s not a view but.
WILL THE NEXT COACH BE GIVEN A LONG CONTRACT
“Again, not a board discussion we’ve had yet, but the way I would think about it is it depends on the candidate. You look at the track record and has it been something that they’ve been able to maintain? It’s an intense and pressurised environment. How have they handled that in the past with the jobs that they’ve had, it’s a bit like player contracts as well, there’s generally levers within the contract either way to say that if it’s not working at that point, you can go that way and we’ll go that way. That happened with Eddie, he had an inflection point because he stated publicly that he didn’t think we didn’t have the money and we hadn’t progressed the centralised model as quickly as he would like. So that became an inflection point and both parties were just happy to part ways. He made the decision and that was accepted. It all happened very quickly.
“In terms of the (next) coach, I’m loath to say too much because I really want to make the high performance director accountable for and and driving that with (CEO) Phil Waugh and making sure we get the best candidates there and we get to pick from the best candidates. You’ve got to weigh up if we have a short term deal. The reality is that person might be going well and you might want to for another two years so it’s a bit of a gamble. Sometimes you can sort through the agreement and have those levers but generally it’s both ways. So you risk it if you put it in but we’ll work that through. But I think the immediacy of getting that person in who has a good understanding of the Australian Super Rugby players and the team and the Wallabies and their current challenges that they’ve got? They’ve got to bring a group together pretty quickly and they’ve got to get the faith of all the Super Rugby clubs to be getting them on board, to start sharing all the information, making sure that they’re meeting good standards of fitness and strength and conditioning, training and all the rest of the things that go into the athletic performance and they’re sharing among each other. They’re competing with each other, but they should be sharing a lot of information like other unions do. And so we need that high performance director to pull all of that in.”
THE BOTTOM LINE
“Like a lot of unions did, we lost a lot of money during Covid and that put us on the back foot. And since then we’ve had to try and get ourselves back into a better position. And we’ve got a lot of mouths to feed. When I was running around, it was men’s fifteens. Now there’s men’s and women’s fifteens, there’s men’s and women’s sevens. We are nowhere near the four times of revenue to fund those adequately. So we’re in a position where we’re going to have to prioritise where we spend the money to make sure we get the most return. And that doesn’t just mean financially getting the best return, It might be from a game participation point of view or whatever we’re facing. Financially, we went down the road of exploring private equity. I’m glad we didn’t do it. I think with two big capital events we’ve got coming with the Lions and the World Cup, we’ve got an opportunity to set the game up a bit like we had back in the early 2000s, but they didn’t make the most of that, in my view. There were a lot of reasons for that. It’s nobody’s fault. I’m probably not qualified (to comment). I wasn’t around at that time. I was as a player (but not) as an administrator. But we got an opportunity with these two big capital events to set ourselves up both from a fan point of view, because even the World Cup, when it’s not in your home patch, it’s very hard to maximise the impact of that World Cup. We made the final in 2015, but we didn’t get any big spike in participation or membership or finances or anything there. So it was great, people felt good. It was a bit of a false dawn in my view, because we could’ve lost to Scotland in the quarterfinal. But we didn’t and we weren’t able to turn that into anything meaningful. And normal programming was resumed. We lost three 3-0 to England and, in Super Rugby, we weren’t beating the Kiwis and so forth so that we didn’t fix anything there.
“We’ve got a couple of big events coming, we’ll be the epicentre of the world for rugby and we’ve got all the eyes upon us. If we’re performing well and go deep into those home tournament’s and we can be really competitive with the Lions and it goes down to a final game, then that will just put rugby back on the map, in my view, and we’ll make some really good money.
“But then we’ve got to be really careful with how we use that because we can set the game up for a long, long time out of the back of that. So to get through to that point to ensure that we’ve got enough to invest in a couple of the key areas now and give ourselves some headroom we’ve done a debt deal that we’ve just announced, we’ll be in a position to pay that back post Lions so we’ll be in a good position going into a home World Cup.”
KEEPING SPONSORS HAPPY
“In terms of sponsorship, I’ve done that job before. Every year you’ve got 20, 30, 40% of your sponsors turning over and you’re always going to lose some and they (Harvey Norman) were on the record saying that had nothing to do with what happened. We’d been in discussions with Harvey Norman for several months and knew that they were at risk well before any of this was known and that’s just how sponsors operate.
“That’s just part and parcel of sponsorship of sport. I’ve spoken to most of them, left messages for a few, and they’re all really supportive. They like the game, they support the game, the community aspect of the game. One of the real benefits of rugby is the community and the high performance are kind of interlinked and interwoven. So they love the access to the market, they love the market that rugby represents, they love the values of the game. Cadbury said to me that rugby’s values line up with Cadbury’s values and that’s why we support the game. But it’ll always be a challenge. We’ll lift sponsorship by winning more.
“New Zealand are doing a good job, they’re getting much bigger sponsorship than what we are because of the way that they win and they position the All Blacks brand. In a market of only five million people they’re getting significant money for sponsorship and broadcast because they’re winning more often. And the power of that brand. So we’ve got to start doing that better and the sponsorship takes care of itself.”
WHAT HE’S DONE SINCE RETIRING AS A PLAYER
“What have I done? I ended my rugby career in France and then I had a bad neck injury and was laid up there for a few years where I couldn’t do much at all. I had neural damage and so forth. I stayed over in France and ended up setting up a small business working with local government. The Wallabies came out for the 2007 World Cup and they were only about 40 minutes away from where I live so the local provincial government and local council, I started talking to them about how we can attract Australians and then all of a sudden doing some work with Austrade and then they wanted to set up a sister city relationship with Sydney between Montpellier so I was part of that delegate to do that. And then I came back on one of those trips with the French delegates, and I met the owner of Skins who wanted to get into France, and didn’t have any people in France. So I became sort of the manager of Skins in France. So I did that while I was in France and the (2007) World Cup was kind of the end time. So I just had some fun post-retirement and kept busy over there. Then came back, I’d worked in property development when I was here and wanted to go into property and came back and they were looking to redevelop Ballymore. The chairman at the time was a property guy and he said, Why don’t you come and help me get the development approval for Ballymore through because it’s a local government issue. So Ballymore is owned by the state government on a deed of grant in trust. Queensland Rugby has a 99 year perpetual lease so they have to approve it then. Then the feds are the ones who have the money. So I started working on that to get the development approval and that was hard, but it was a really good experience because it was all the stakeholders, I had to go and sit in people’s houses who lived around Ballymore and sit in the kindergarten, negotiate with the kindergarten, why they would support Ballymore redevelopment. We had 1200 letters against the development which the council at that stage said we’d never seen anything like this. It was a really organised local group, against Ballymore.So the (Albion Park) race track out here, the massive development that they doing out there was $1 billion development they had four letters against that we had 1200 against Ballymore so I’d go and sit at rugby clubs on weekends get people to sign up to it. And we ended up getting 1400 letters for it because council needed to say people are supportive.So that was a really interesting experience. That was always with a view of I don’t want to be part of rugby, I was rugby’d out but this was a way coming back into Australia and, and getting into property and doing what I wanted to do.
WORKING FOR QUEENSLAND RUGBY
“Rod McCall became chairman of Queensland Rugby. We had 80% of the sponsors off of Queensland Rugby and 24 of the professional players are off contracts and, and they changed chair and they changed CEO and needed to find a coach. So he just said to me, can you find us a coach, can you lock the sponsors down, can you lock the players down? So that was the next sort of 12, 18, 24 months. I said, I’ll do it but I don’t want to be in footy. I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as just an ex footy player so I did that. We got Ewen McKenzie on board as coach, a new CEO came in from the AFL. He was very, very good in those first four years. He came in, he sort of turned the commercials of Queensland Rugby on its head. We got up to 50,000 members at one point. We were selling 38,000 tickets at Suncorp, averaging 38,000 at Suncorp for Reds games. We were beating the Broncos at one point in terms of crowds. So it was a good turnaround. So I did various roles, head of strategy, head of commercialisation, head of high performance for a period at the start there. And then after a while decided that I wanted to get away from rugby and sport. And then I had an offer to come and run this company. So I’ve been here for seven years running this, we’ve got about five offices and 100 people and I’ve just been running that on behalf of the owner the last seven years.”
WHY HE JOINED THE RA BOARD
“Three years ago I was approached to put in a nomination for the board. I said, ‘the main thing I think I can offer is I know what drives the commercials.’ Most of the money comes in through the professional game and that money is the money that then funds the community game. So that’s broken. So whilst that’s the way it is, it’ll never generate enough money to then grow the game. So it’s just going to be continually teetering because of the lack of performance and your brand damage from not winning. The Wallabies aren’t going to get huge sponsors. They’re not going to get a big broadcast because they’re not winning. Community is about participation and fun around your club but elite sport is about winning. And if you don’t win, then you’re not serving the purpose that you’re there to do so. So I said ‘I know what has to happen and I think I can get the right people around it to do it. So if that is something that the board is interested in, then I’ll apply, I’ll put my nomination in. But if not, then there’s countless other people who can offer the same value but unless they’ve got an appetite to do that,’
“So I was told they do have an interest, and they know that it needs to change so if you can at least bring this to the attention and start to look at that, then that’s something. But then I got on the board and went straight from my first meeting into a potential solvency, then straight into a Covid meeting with the players so straight from the AGM zoom into a zoom negotiation with the players about how we can’t afford to pay you because we’ve just had our lights turned out with Covid. So it triggered, are we going to be solvent? We didn’t have a broadcast agreement. So then all of these other things started to immediately take centre stage around what future we have. The first 12 months were very much just trying to stay alive.
“Now with the debt facility, we’ve got some headroom now we can make some decisions, we can go forward and we can invest in a few areas that we know we can get return on, but we can’t do that unless we get everyone behind us. That’s kind of the trick.
“Why me (as chairman)? The board felt that I was the best among them to try and bring everyone together. I had no interest in doing it. I didn’t put my hand up to do it. They all asked me to do it and said we think you’re the right person for this, this, this. And I said, ‘Well, I’ll need everyone’s support if I do it because I’m not going to be an executive chairman. I’ll be what I think a chairman needs to do and I’ll focus on the key areas that I think I can add value to. But everyone around this table is going to have to contribute in their own way and make sure that we all lean into this.”
More Coverage
Originally published as Rugby Australia: Full Dan Herbert interview on the state of the game
Heartbreaker! Rising stars of Waratahs, Reds rugby produce U15s thriller
There was heartbreak for one and elation for the other. The annual battle between the Waratahs and Reds U15s had it all, including a match clinching last minute penalty.
Rugby Australia fires back at NRL after poaching threat
Rugby Australia’s talent pipeline is under threat from the NRL’s hungry clubs, but the 15-man code has made a massive move to stave off the cashed-up suitors.