Phil Kearns two Super Rugby teams to be axed

Former Australian captain says five Super Rugby franchises are not fit for purpose and has urged for two teams to be cut for the sake of the Wallabies.

Phil Kearns, right, says the ousting of chairman Hamish McLennan was the result of immature behaviour by state unions Picture: Stuart Walmsley

Former Wallabies captain Phil Kearns said Rugby Australia must slash two Super Rugby teams to regain “our performance and stature” and to resurrect the ailing Wallabies after their disastrous World Cup campaign.

Kearns said Australian Super Rugby teams was full of “ordinary” talent and that the move by member unions to oust Hamish McLennan as chair was a case of the “lunatics running the asylum”. However, he believes the game has a promising future, with chief executive Phil Waugh in charge.

With rumblings that ACT Brumbies are potentially on the chopping block, and Melbourne Rebels unlikely to survive beyond this year, Kearns said it’s time for hard decisions to secure the future of the embattled code.

“We have too many teams in Australia, there’s no doubt,” Kearns said. “Our talent is spread way too thin. And there are some. I use the term advisedly, ordinary players playing Super Rugby. If you’ve got ordinary players, you get ordinary teams. Which is why we’re not excelling against the New Zealanders. Physically our players are probably up to it, certainly the good ones are. But skill wise we’re definitely not there and that’s a function of just we’ve got our talent spread too thin and we are coaching the wrong things.

“The vast majority of our players still come out of New South Wales and Queensland and despite the Rebels being around for, what, 10 years? And the Force is pretty much the same. they’re not producing the quality or volume of players that we need to be competitive.”

Kearns said he would prefer the Brumbies stay in the competition over other franchises.

“I would probably be erring towards the Brumbies staying in and I say that really from the lens of they’ve shown for a long time that the program to improve players has been well proven,” he said.

The Melbourne Rebels are unlikely to feature in Super Rugby next season as its financial crisis deepens Pitcure: Getty Images

Kearns said the Queensland-led coup, which saw McLennan ousted was childish.

McLennan had started to centralise the game’s high performance programs and commercial operations but many states and territories including the ACT refusing to cede control. The Brumbies, who are in debt, signed a letter along with five rebellious state unions for McLennan to resign. If he didn’t they’d call an extraordinary general meeting to vote him out.

Kearns said the states’ reluctance to centralise was indicative of a self-centred culture that permeated rugby’s top ranks.

“Here you’ve got again the lunatics trying to run the asylum and we’ve seen that they can’t run things in their own cell, let alone in the asylum,” Kearns said. “It’s just a farcical situation and Hamish paid the price for their stupidity. Their pride was standing in the way. I thought it was immature.

“I don’t think they had a grasp of the issues and some of the positive things that Hamish had done for the game. They’d had their feelings hurt along the way. Like, who cares? Hamish might have said and done a few things which was a little bit bold – but what do you expect – he’s got a nickname of the ‘Hammer’. Sure the Eddie Jones decision was wrong but many others, including the majority of rugby supporters in Australia, supported the move.”

“He was getting some things done. We wouldn’t have had Harvey Norman as sponsor, we wouldn’t have had Cadbury as a sponsor and we wouldn’t have had a television deal. Without Hamish his ability to get things done, we wouldn’t have had a World Cup bid board with the likes of Sir Rod Eddington, Sir Peter Cosgrove, former prime minister John Howard and Fortescue chief Elizabeth Gaines on it.”

Kearns said while NSW Rugby Union, the Waratahs, had wholly centralised, the other member unions refusing to, or delaying, passing over commercial power to Rugby Australia’s head office, had not aged well.

Kearns said the Brumbies deserve to survive if Australia scale back to three Super Rugby teams Picture: Getty Images

The Brumbies are still in debt, private equity have not been able to invest in the franchise.

“I mean, New South Wales were open minded enough and wise enough to go down the path that they’ve gone there, whereas these people now, the guys from the ACT, we’re now seeing that what they were saying is a total farce,” Kearns said.

“They were all broke. We’ve seen the way that has played out in Victoria. We haven’t seen the others just yet but to put up this bravado when they’re in so much trouble ….was just hopeless.”

Kearns noted that there were some good people tied up in the Rebels’ financial drama such as long-time board member Lyndsey Cattermole. The Rebels have over $20m in debt with a tax bill of $11.6m.

The auditors report into the Rebels revealed Cattermole is owed nearly $350,000.

“I really feel sorry for some people – like Lyndsey – she’s a fabulous person, her heart is absolutely in the right place and she has done so much for rugby in Victoria, and is this the way that we repay someone like that?” Kearns said.

Kearns said as rugby has battled on, a bright light in all this has been Waugh’s leadership.

Waugh is not a year into his job but is dealing with a franchise in voluntary administration, an $80 million loan and trying to reignite the Wallabies among other things. Kearns believes he is doing well.

“A whole bunch of things have arisen that he wouldn’t have known were going to arise and so I’d say he’s still drinking from a fire hose at the moment,” Kearns said.

“I think the thing that gives me comfort about where the leadership is that his decision making in the game comes from his experience in the grassroots. He was a ball boy when I was playing through the ranks of Warringah. And then he worked his way up through school boy rugby, to club rugby to play for the New South Wales Waratahs and finally the Wallabies. There’s nothing wrong with that pathway. People from Western Australia if they are a team to go – or Victoria – they may feel left out in the cold in terms of the pathway for their juniors. But you know John Welborn, there’s a fabulous example of the way that it should work. He was a standout player in club rugby in WA, then moved to Sydney and became a standout here and then representing the Wallabies. That’s a good pathway.”