Spotfires breaking out on all fronts for rugby officials

As one rugby official put it on Monday, fires are raging all on all fronts and, sadly, they are not going away any time soon

Raelene Castle will return from holidays to a rugby firestorm. Picture: John Feder

As one rugby official put it on Monday, fires are raging on all fronts and, sadly, they are not going away any time soon. It was an apt summation not just of the current physical threat to lives and property in this country but also of the situation Australian rugby finds itself in.

It is all building to a climax and the only good news for rugby is that the ultimate trial, the Israel Folau court case, has petered out just at the point when everyone was predicting it was about to peak. While that has saved rugby an awful lot of money and, who knows, maybe reputational damage as well, there are still enough spot fires springing up everywhere to keep anxiety levels stretched to screaming point.

The broadcast deal still rages out of control. Fox Sports, which joined the Ten Network and overseas broadcasters to provide rugby with a $57m-a-year allowance when the last deal was done five years ago, is understood to have come up with a lesser figure this time around. Rugby Australia rejected the offer and insisted it wanted to explore other options — in this case, Optus, which is itself a little light on after negotiating for the English Premier League.

Rugby officials, who within days will release the tender documents for their broadcast rights, still insist they see their partnership with Fox as one to be preserved. Ultimately, Fox will have first refusal before a deal is done.

What has entirely escaped attention here — possibly because RA saw no value in highlighting it — is that comparing the 2016 deal and the five-year deal still to be struck for 2021 is hardly apples for apples. The overall deal of $285m negotiated by Bill Pulver as the crowning jewel of his time as executive director of the then Australian Rugby Union covered not four Super Rugby franchises but five. When the Pulver deal was done, the Western Force were still part of the Super Rugby landscape, with Pulver stubbornly insisting that rugby could not “shrink its way to greatness”. Within a very short space of time, however, that had all changed and the ARU ruthlessly culled the Perth franchise.

Watch over 50 sports LIVE on Kayo! Stream to your TV, mobile, tablet or computer. Just $25/month, cancel anytime. New to Kayo? Get your 14-day free trial & start streaming instantly >

Theoretically, then, RA would need to negotiate a five-year deal of “only” $228m for the surviving Super Rugby franchises, the Waratahs, Reds, Brumbies and Rebels, to be on the same rate they would have received in 2016 as their share of the five-way split-up. Theoretically, that makes Pulver successor Raelene Castle’s job of negotiating a uplift for each of the franchises somewhat easier.

Conversely, this time the level of interest from overseas broadcasters, namely Sky Sport, which paid about $12m annually for the Super Rugby rights, has dropped off immensely.

And again, it’s not apples and apples. The 2016 deal was done with a 15-team competition in mind. The 2021 deal envisages only 14 teams, with the Sunwolves of Japan a victim of SANZAAR short-sightedness. To be fair, however, it wasn’t just SANZAAR being myopic. The Japanese Rugby Football Union hardly showed any long-range vision ­either in allowing the Sunwolves to go under.

So the Super Rugby of 2021 will go ahead as a straight-out round-robin affair. This will eliminate the despised conference system, meaning every team will play every other team. It also eliminates the one desirable element of playing in conferences — local derbies. From next season, there will be no home-and-away rivalry between the four Australian teams. Instead, NSW will play Queensland only the once, in either Sydney or Brisbane. And the same with all the other local derbies. From a broadcast deal perspective, these are the highest-rating games of all.

Moreover, South Africa has now abandoned its own Giteau Law, which means precious few Springbok will be coming to Australia with the Bulls or Stormers, Sharks or Lions this year.

The sooner SANZAAR recognises that the original format for Super Rugby has outlived its usefulness and replaces it with a souped-up trans-Tasman competition, the better for the commercial viability of all concerned.

The Waratahs, who surprisingly are on course to announce a profit of about $750,000, still have not replaced Andrew Hore, whose unexpected departure for his ­native New Zealand caught them completely by surprise.

Philip van Schalkwyk, the NSWRU’s chief financial officer who has been running the Tahs in a caretaker capacity, has indicated that he will not stay on as a fulltime employee once a replacement is found but will remain as a consultant. That’s a considerable blow to NSW. Anyone who can conjure up a profit out of Australian rugby at this particular juncture will be sorely missed.

Still, it is understood some 150 candidates worldwide have put up their hand to replace Hore, so there is clearly no shortage of talent for chairman Roger Davis and his board to choose from.

Meanwhile, the literal fires show no signs of abating. And while the Brumbies have moved to Newcastle to complete their training for their opening Super Rugby match on Friday, January 31, the reason for their relocation — the quality, or lack of it, of the air in Canberra — remains an issue.

As it is, Brumbies CEO Phil Thomson admitted there were no guarantees the players would be able to return to Canberra once their 10-day stay in Newcastle was up. The Brumbies may be forced to put them up for longer in a hotel, which will drain their modest resources and those of RA.

And then there is the game itself, now little more than three weeks away. Thomson doesn’t know what will happen if the match cannot go ahead in Canberra as planned — presumably a nil-all draw and points shared, if the model for the Crusader-Highlanders fixture cancelled after the Christchurch massacre last year is any guide — but he did admit that he, RA and SANZAAR had all ­batted ideas around.

Castle, meanwhile, is expected to return from her annual holiday at the start of next week.

Hopefully she will be more well-rested than Scott Morrison was after his brief sojourn in Hawaii. Like the Prime Minister, she is walking into a firestorm.