RA chair Hamish McLennan to offer Fox Sports a two-year deal

Rugby Australia chairman Hamish McLennan is prepared to do a broadcast deal for a minimum of just two years.

It is the way broadcast deals have been done in southern hemisphere rugby since the dawn of the professional era, but Rugby Australia boss Hamish McLennan is challenging convention, insisting he is prepared to do a deal for a minimum of just two years.

Ever since the then Australian Rugby Union brokered a deal with Fox Sport in 1995 for $US550m, the broadcast rights have always been negotiated in five-year cycles.

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But with the current deal set to expire in December and the game of rugby in global upheaval because of the COVID-19 pandemic, McLennan sees no reason for either Fox or RA to lock itself into terms that could quickly change almost overnight.

“We are completely open to doing a deal for two, three or five years,” he said on Thursday.

The expectation is that the day of the huge broadcast deal is long over in this depressed environment. In that event, RA looks to be backing itself and deferring a longer deal until it is back on its feet, both financially and as a rugby power.

Present circumstances could hardly be worse for RA, with the pandemic forcing the abandonment of Super Rugby, RA boss Raelene Castle being forced to resign, and McLennan inheriting the role of chairman after the mooted likely chairman resigned from the board.

A deal, understood to be worth around $8 million, finally was done with Fox to enable the Super Rugby AU competition to start up last week. But money is so tight that NSW flew up and back to Brisbane in the space of 16 hours for last Friday’s match against the Reds. The Reds will do the same when they travel to Sydney to play Melbourne Rebels tonight at Brookvale Oval.

And things may have taken a turn for the worse with Australian officials learning that half of the New Zealand Rugby board favour an eight-team competition, featuring the five existing Kiwi Super Rugby sides, a Pacific Islands team and just two Australian franchises.

That is impossibly removed from the five teams Australia has argued for – the Waratahs, Reds, Brumbies and Rebels along with the side booted out of Super Rugby in 2017, the Andrew Forrest-funded Western Force. Yet even if that presumably contrived leak represents no more than New Zealand hardliners’ opening negotiating gambit, it is hard to see how any compromise could arrive at more than four Australian sides, at best.

Australia went through enough grief three years ago without subjecting itself to another fratricidal round of “who should stay and who should go”. Besides, the new board won widespread approval by announcing its commitment to getting grassroots rugby moving again, and culling another team would be an unmitigated disaster.

There are green shoots evident, however.

All four teams involved in last weekend’s matches showcased the brilliant young talent in the system. The hope is that today’s youth will end up leading a resurgence in Australian rugby in a year or two, but if RA now sells its rights long-term in the current market, it is dooming itself to living a hand-to-mouth existence.

But before it can go to the broadcasters, RA needs to have the 2021 competition sorted, which makes negotiations over the next fortnight critical.

Still, Australia will not completely be at the mercy of the Kiwis. As the only contender for the 2027 World Cup, Australia is in a position to offer New Zealand the opportunity to stage the pool involving the All Blacks, so the more generous the Kiwi position on a trans-Tasman competition, the more generous Australia can afford to be with its World Cup offer.

NSW Rugby Union chairman Roger Davis said that the universal opinion was for a trans-Tasman competition.

“A full trans-Tasman,” Davis stipulated. “There is not a shadow of a chance of us going ahead with only two sides. Can you imagine what that would do to the game in Australia?

“If the New Zealanders don’t want to party with what is a common-sense solution in the interest of both nations, both sets of players and the broadcaster, then we have plenty of other good options. We will go our way and they will be the loser for it.”