How a Bulldogs recruit came to run Australian rugby

Rugby Australia’s new chief executive Andy Marinos was spotted playing rugby for Natal in 1995 and recruited by Super League club, the Bulldogs, right at the height of rugby league’s civil war.

Andy Marinos, centre, in 2009 with Springboks captain John Smit and coach Peter de Villiers

The late Peter “Bullfrog” Moore played a critical role in rugby league in the 1980s and 1990s but he has made a posthumous gift to rugby union by initially bringing to this country the man who on Wednesday was announced as Rugby Australia’s new chief executive, Andy Marinos.

Marinos, a self-described Zimbabwean who became a naturalised South African, an adopted Welshman and soon to become an Australian citizen, was spotted by Moore while playing rugby for Natal as a centre in 1995 and recruited for the Super League club, the Sydney Bulldogs, right at the height of rugby league’s civil war.

It gave the young Marinos a taste for international adventure and though he returned to South Africa in 1997 having played only a single game of Super League, he never again saw himself as anything other than a citizen of the world.

Andy Marinos in 1996 after being recruited by the Bulldogs

Certainly that is how he came to the attention of Rugby Australia. As boss of SANZAAR, Marinos has been a peripheral if only slightly removed observer of many of the crises Australian rugby has been through in recent years and increasingly his candidature for the RA chief executive role – which has been filled on an interim basis by Rob Clarke following the removal of Raelene Castle in April – came to be seen in a more favourable light.

“Andy is a rugby blueblood with impeccable connections in the northern and southern hemisphere and is greatly respected by all,” said RA chairman Hamish McLennan on Wednesday. “He understands that we need, on one hand, to get our grassroots flying while on the other to drive our commercial relationships.”

Although Clarke in November completed a three-year $100m deal with Nine and Stan, it is still attempting to monetise its international rights and there is no doubt that Marinos can bring his international experience fully to bear in this area when he starts his new role with RA in February.

In many respects, the past two and a half decades have prepared Marinos for the challenges he is about to face.

Though selected in the Springbok squad in 1999, he was lured to Britain by the then Welsh coach Graham Henry that same year and eventually represented Wales in eight Tests. Five years into his playing career at Newport, he went from captaining the side one week to putting on a jacket and tie and taking over the club as chief executive. Although he had always shown an interest in sports administration, it still must have been quite a feat managing the transition from exhorting his fellow players on the field to sitting across the table from them a few days later for contract negotiations.

Auckland Warriors' former All Black Mark Ellis tries to fend off Andy Marinos during Super League trial at Lancaster Park, Christchurch in 1996

A fact-finding mission took him back to South Africa and no one was more surprised than Marinos when he found himself headhunted by South African Rugby for the role of director of rugby in what turned out to be the critical period leading up to the Springboks’ 2007 World Cup triumph orchestrated by Jake White.

Even when he found himself on the outer as South African Rugby reorganised its internal administration, he still was retained as head of commercial and legal, the role he filled for nearly a decade before being appointed boss of SANZAAR in 2016.

Marinos was often criticised for being a faceless man in one of the highest-profile positions in world rugby but, in many respects, that was the nature of his job. He effectively was representing the three most successful countries in World Cup history – South Africa, New Zealand and Australia – plus the new addition to the club, Argentina and it cannot have been easy finding common ground among them.

His arrival in the job coincided with the decision to wind back the expansion of Super Rugby to 18 teams – which meant the axing of not just the Western Force but also two South African sides, the Cheetahs and the Southern Kings. And scarcely had that crisis been navigated than Marinos found himself engaged in an even more fundamental fight to get rugby on the park as SANZAAR was hit by the global Covid pandemic.

“I’m coming to this role with no prior prejudices or politics or hang-ups between state unions or individuals so I can look at the situations with a very clean slate,” Marinos told The Australian on Wednesday.

He arrives just as Wallabies Test hooker Brandon Paenga-Amosa has signed a deal with a French club but he does not see this as evidence of a wholesale “player drain” to Europe.

“I see it as a one-off,” Marinos told The Australian.

“I think the Wallabies have regrouped and played very well under Dave Rennie and put forward some solid performances. You are going to get players who want to move on and sometimes it can be a good thing. A guy who has played a couple of Tests comes back to Australia with a different skill set and attributes. And I want to see the best 23 players available to Australia playing in Australia every weekend.

“If you do the right thing by rugby, it will do the right thing for you.”