What is wrong with rugby faking it till it makes it?

In the course of one day this week, Thursday from memory, the following rumours crossed my desk …

Alex Newsome scores for the Waratahs against the Reds last week. An Origin-style fixture may flop but is worth a try. Picture: AFP

In the course of one day this week, Thursday from memory, the following rumours crossed my desk…

South Africa rugby to take the plunge into private equity in a big way; South Africa to send additional teams to the northern hemisphere; South Africa to send teams to compete in a New Zealand competition; South Africa to send teams to compete in an Australian competition; New Zealand to use the outbreak of COVID-19 cases in the south Auckland region as a pretext for continuing next year with the Super Rugby Aotearoa competition; private equity firm CVC, Silverlake and Providence all interested in Australian rugby but only if the country is involved in a trans-Tasman competition.

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There were, as you might expect, infinite subsections of each rumour. Would South African Rugby boss Jurie Roux send his best teams north, the Sharks and the Stormers, for example, while holding the likes of the Bulls and the Lions in reserve, in case it was in South Africa’s interest to send them east? How far east, of course, would depend on whether Australia and New Zealand could restore their relationship to an adult level and get down to meaningful talks on a trans-Tasman model or whether stubborn pride would be the order of the day.

I remarked to Rob Clarke, the interim Rugby Australia chief executive, recently that I sympathised with him over his task in the coming months. Not only did he have to juggle so many balls but he had not a clue when any of them would land. It was, said Clarke with a chuckle, actually even more complicated than that. The balls which landed actually influenced the other balls still in the air. Outcomes changed, not just because X had happened but because of when it happened and how the timing impacted on the whole juggling act. The flow-on effects are brutal.

Dave Rennie remarked on that as well. Another week goes by, he said, another seven plans go into the rubbish bin. Setting a course is becoming almost impossible. One day you’re on a heading of 90 degrees. The next 270. Say, doesn’t that island look familiar?

What, do you suppose, the chances were back in May of Western Force coach Tim Sampson figuring he would be domiciled, along with his entire team, at Kingscliff on the far north coast of NSW by mid-August? Or that Dave Wessels and his Melbourne Rebels would end up enjoying the hospitality of Terrigal?

Small wonder Brett Gosper, the CEO of World Rugby, has tried to introduce some degree of certainty into rugby planning over the next decade by announcing four Rugby World Cup hosts — two for men (2027 and 2031) and two for women (2025 and 2029) — all at one time. The use of the word “unprecedented” by journalists has been, well, unprecedented in recent times. Things are happening which would have seemed outlandish, impossible even, in pre-COVID-19 days.

So in circumstances where no-one can accurately predict what is likely to happen even next week, you would think that our leaders — both in the political field and in the sport of rugby — would be cut at least a little slack. Not so, it seems.

Rugby Australia has been criticised for unveiling its broadcast proposal with “great fanfare”, as if this were grounds for criticism. “Yeah, you’re right,” one can imagine Clarke or RA chairman Hamish McLennan confessing. “It really is a heap of s..t. But it’s the best we could scrape together. Why don’t you pay us the miserable amount you think it’s worth and we’ll quietly slink off into the night and not darken your doorstep again?”

The proposed State of the Union series, while welcomed by some, has been attacked by some because it is a rip-off from rugby league which has 40 years of State of Origin history. Well, I have some news for those critics. Rugby league itself stole the idea from the Victorian Football League which in turn stole the idea from a Perth hotelier, Leon Larkin.

Two sources for that story. The original one from “the father of State of Origin”, Senator Ron McAuliffe, who told me years ago that he sat next to Ross Oakley, soon to become the chairman and CEO of the Victorian Football League, on an airline flight and was told by him how Australian rules’ own State of Origin series came into being. The other was Oakley himself. He not only recalled the early days of Origin football but how it came to fizzle out.

“We had 80,000 at the MCG one night to watch a State of Origin game,” Oakley told me on Friday. “The problem with Origin and the AFL was that when AFL became so professional and player payments rose substantially, the clubs started saying to us: ‘Hey, we’re paying them a lot of money but when they get injured playing Origin, we’re stuffed for our premiership efforts’. And they got in the players’ ears. We tried to introduce some rules that if the players weren’t available for State of Origin they couldn’t play the next weekend of games …. all hell broke loose. So it got to the point where the AFL thought, too hard.”

But he doesn’t have any problems with rugby picking up on the NSW-Queensland rivalry. It is, after all, the longest-running rivalry in Australian sport, with the first game ever played in 1882.

“The world is made of people stealing others’ ideas,” said Oakley. “How do you reckon the Japanese became so brilliant at making watches? They copied the Swiss and made them cheaper!”

I don’t doubt that the State of the Union series might be a complete fizzer for rugby. And heaven knows, there will be some already sharpening their knives for McLennan and Clarke if NZ digs its heels in and abandons the trans-Tasman concept because Australia won’t cut some teams.

Yet take note of McLennan’s reasoning, in his own words, for digging in for five Australian teams: “Look at the fight the Force have been putting up,” he explained.

“And last weekend we had the Waratahs dominating the Reds and the Rebels beating the Brumbies. It would be un-Australian to say (to the five franchises) can you keep yourselves open for a domestic competition but you may lose out if we do something with New Zealand. It’s not right and it’s not fair and I’m not going to do that.”

There are a thousand ways in which it could all go wrong for Rugby Australia. That is the world in which we live.

Certainly there is an element of “fake it till you make it” about the RA’s approach. But tell me … what is the alternative?