As the rugby world contracts, Australia’s survival chances rise

Harry Wilson and Noah Lolesio and Angus Bell must all be wondering “Why me?”

Queensland’s Harry Wilson is one of a number of young Australian players who offer hope for the future. Picture: AAP

Harry Wilson and Noah Lolesio and Angus Bell must all be wondering “Why me?” Why, after a quarter of a century of professional Australian rugby, where the best and brightest youngsters were financially set up for life, has the system collapsed just as it was their turn to benefit?

Rugby Australia will meet with the Rugby Union Players Association on Saturday morning to negotiate the terms of a massive pay cut. It’s a bit like the treaty that ended the Pacific War in 1945, the one the Japanese signed on the deck of the USS Missouri. They had but two options — sign or face obliteration. So too the rugby players. It’s a hell of a choice and, in particular, the first-year Super Rugby players’ heads must be spinning. How could it possibly have come to this?

Rugby Australia will reassure them that it is only a temporary measure, one that will last for no more than six months, at which point the game will surely have climbed back to its feet. Possible if highly unlikely. The days of rugby making elite players millionaires overnight are over, though it is taking some time for that brutal reality to sink through.

RA insists, for example, that Michael Hooper’s five-year, million-dollars-a-season contract will be paid out at the full rate. But how can that be? His contract and those signed by Allan Alaalatoa and Taniela Tupou rely on broadcast deals and substantial sponsorships that have pretty much dried up. And suddenly that wonderful boast of the Queensland Reds that they had signed half the rising talent in this country to long-term deals could be stuck in their throats.

With all the goodwill in the world, it is difficult to see how rugby authorities can honour these deals, not without reaching a situation where there will be massive discrepancies in the pay rates of teammates. And that’s always a recipe for disaster. “You’re making the million dollars … you go down on the loose ball!”

No doubt unscrupulous player agents will seize this moment to attempt to break contracts and ship promising young footballers offshore where the money — for the moment –— still looks strong. But as the global economy struggles to recover and the Toyota Verblitz bosses in Japan, just as an example, start receiving messages from head office that until the unsold 10,000 cars stockpiled down by the harbour are sold everyone has to tighten their belts, how is that going to play with rugby wages in the long term?

Still, there is no denying that rugby faces unique challenges. If the AFL is forced to revise its pay scale massively southwards, from say $1m a season to $400,000, what can any player do in response? That’s what the market is prepared to pay. Aussie rules stars can either accept the new reality or head off to see how the Gaelic football pay structure is holding up.

But it’s not simply a matter of RA declaring that $400,000 is the new million. The British and European clubs almost certainly can still offer more. Perhaps not as much as they once could but, still, an appreciable rise on what is on offer in Australia.

So now we come to the crunch. Remaining in Australia is surely going to financially hurt the country’s rising generation of aspiring Wallabies.

Inevitably, there will be those who opt out and head overseas, although they might quickly discover that the Bernard Laportes of the world, the rugby nationalists, have been growing in strength and numbers throughout this crisis.

Soon countries will be shutting down their rugby borders as firmly as they have their international borders and turning all their attention to developing their own players, as Laporte has done in France. English clubs are down to two foreigners a team, but the Kolpak Agreement — that allowed African and Pacific Islander players to play in Britain — is now doubly under threat from Brexit and COVID-19. Even before the coronavirus struck, the moratorium on Kolpak players in Britain was scheduled to end either this season or at the end of 2020-21.

The rugby world is contracting, which, perversely, gives Australian rugby a fighting chance. As Rugby Australia chairman Paul McLean has acknowledged, some good can still come of all this madness.

Rugby’s fundamentals — its club football — have rarely been stronger. Sydney and Brisbane club competitions can drive a bottom-up resurgence, in tandem with a top-down Wallabies revival.

The AFL and the NRL are hurting almost as much so if RA gets it right — yeah, yeah, quieten down at the back — rugby can make modest relative gains, albeit from a low base. But to simply suggest, as RA is now doing, that it will leave its talk of a “think tank” until it has resolved its present problems, is folly of the highest order. Get the “think tank” thinking. Surely rugby has not lost the capacity to plan strategically at the same time as it is operating tactically?

The provincial level looms as the greatest worry. The expectation is that a restart to normal Super Rugby cannot happen by 2021, if ever. Now, while the slate is clean, is the time to link up with New Zealand to form a trans-Tasman competition. Australia probably isn’t capable of maintaining one side at the current rates, let alone four, so either it scales back its operations dramatically, or merges the Brumbies and the Rebels, or persuades Andrew Forrest to fund the Western Force for the duration — perhaps all three — or it basically will have to move backwards to an amateur game.

Whatever happens, rugby can’t keep cannibalising itself. Right now it needs everyone pushing in the same direction.

Now, more than ever, the game is turning towards its youth, to Wilson and Will Harrison, to Luke Wright and Fraser McReight, to Mark Nawaqanitawase and Andrew Kellaway. They are the brightest hopes, the promise of a future. How they act now could well determine whether Australian rugby has a future.