Wallabies set to return to the gold standard

Ex-Wallabues to convene to decide on a jersey that cuts the mustard.

Joe Roff, Ben Tune and Stephen Larkham celebrate the World Cup win wearing the traditional gold jersey Picture: Getty Images

It’s window dressing, no denying it. But sometimes window-dressing is important.

Next week, Rugby Australia will move to act on a subject near and dear to the heart of its chairman, Hamish McLennan – the constancy or lack thereof of the Wallabies jersey.

Granted, there would seem to be many more pressing issues for RA to address than whether the Wallabies play in gold jerseys or yellow or some shade in between. To be fair, in the nine months that McLennan has held the reins in Australian rugby, he and his acting chief executive, Rob Clarke, have been ticking off the more important targets one by one – the broadcast deal, getting Super Rugby and Test football going again in the face of a global pandemic, cutting the excess fat out of the Australian game, reconnecting with grassroots.

“I think there is a sense of optimism in the air but there is still lots of work to do,” said McLennan, summing up the widespread mood in the embattled code.

While he acknowledges there are more urgent priorities in the game than the shade of the Test jersey, he also believes that making a firm statement on its colour might help bring Australian rugby back to its roots. While he didn’t say as much, there is a sense that for several years now Australian rugby has been trying to be all things to its fans. The substance was missing, so too the style.

“It’s about putting the positive DNA of rugby back into the organisation,” he said, explaining the purpose of bringing together some 40 of the greatest Australian players, coaches and selectors at the Crown in Sydney on January 28 – with a simultaneous dinner happening in Brisbane for Queensland rugby luminaries – to settle the issue of the Wallabies colour once and for all.

“We will talk about the history of the jersey a little bit and then we will go through a knockout process, going from eight to six to four to two to one jersey and we will vote through the night and have a few laughs. It will be a fun night but there will be a point to it.”

Back in 2012, Australian five-eighth Quade Cooper found himself in a world of pain, attacked from all sides not because he had criticised the mood in the Test camp but because he had referred to the Wallabies jersey as “yellow”.

“The environment there at the moment is one that I don‘t feel comfortable in, and if I don’t feel comfortable and if I don’t feel that I can give 100 per cent for my country and that yellow jersey, that’s a very big problem,” Cooper said at the time.

It was more a criticism of the set-up under then Wallabies coach Robbie Deans but the fact was that Cooper was correct in one sense – it was a yellow jersey. And it wasn’t resonating with Wallabies fans.

There is certainly a fair degree of nostalgia as far as the Wallabies jersey goes. Australia’s two Rugby World Cup wins, in 1991 and 1999, were achieved in jerseys that were essentially mustard-hued but were certainly more gold than yellow.

And while McLennan wouldn’t deem to influence the vote, he wouldn’t be at all disappointed if Australia rediscovered the gold standard.

“Gold is premium,” he said. “It is part of our heritage.”