‘Un-Australian Wallabies’: what the press isn’t telling you
English scribes have been forthright about what’s wrong with the national team following the first Test loss in Brisbane – and it’s Joe Schmidt who should carry the can.
If you listen to some Australian commentators, the Wallabies’ final 20 minutes in the first Test loss to the Lions was the greatest final 20 minutes played since William Webb Ellis caught the ball and ran it back with glee during a school soccer match in 1823.
If you listen to the British media, Australian rugby has sunk so low it’s unrecognisable.
The Telegraph’s Oliver Brown described the performance as “tepid, toothless, and un-Australian”. In The Times, Stuart Barnes reckoned the Wallabies played “more like Matildas” in the first 50 minutes, savaging coach Joe Schmidt’s decision to leave Angus Bell and Tate McDermott on the bench because it allowed the Lions to play on a “dreamy front foot”.
Perhaps another indication of how low the bar has been set is the lack of scrutiny over Schmidt’s selections and tactics.
Young five-eighth Tom Lynagh’s emotional post-match interview about following in the footsteps of his famous father, Michael, was a warm-and-fuzzy moment but starting with a rookie No.10 in an opening Test against the might of the Lions was a mistake.
Onwards to Melbourne on Saturday night for the second Test, where a sea of fans in red jumpers is expected to fill the MCG.
Saudis deliver tough love for rugby’s dreamers
The Australian administrator who decides how Saudi Arabia spends its seemingly bottomless pit of money on sport says the country has no interest in funding the rebel rugby competition R360, telling The Australian: “We’re not an ATM.
Former A-League boss Danny Townsendis the chief executive of Surj Sports Investment, a division of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund tasked with making the Gulf kingdom the heaviest hitter in world sport.
The Saudis have LIV Golf. They have the 2034 FIFA World Cup. They have football superstar Cristiano Ronaldo, who declared last month “I belong to Saudi Arabia” after signing a $740m, two-year extension to play in the domestic Pro League.
They also have a 10 per cent stake in DAZN, the so-called “Netflix of sports” that earlier this year acquired Foxtel, meaning they’ll have an important say in how Australia’s most popular sports are broadcast.
What the Saudis don’t have are plans to buy into R360, the mysterious grand prix-style league targeting international rugby union players, including those currently representing the British & Irish Lions against the Wallabies, and NRL stars.
“We don’t just spit out money – we’re not an ATM,” Townsend said from Riyadh. “Every time there’s a sport looking for capital, we get listed as the institutional investor behind the change. I get calls from people asking, ‘Is this you guys?’ And we’re not. R360 is a great example. The number of calls I’ve had with people saying, ‘I hear the Saudis are behind it’. Not at all. I haven’t met anyone from there and we have no intention in investing in rugby like that.
“There are 20 priority sports that we’re investing in. I wouldn’t say rugby’s not important to the kingdom, but it’s certainly not a priority for us. Funding a breakaway league, for which I’ve never seen a single skerrick of information except what I’ve read in the media, is something we haven’t had a conversation about.”
Speculation about Saudi funding cranked up last week when several NRL players were linked to the rebel league, including New Zealand Warriors dual-international Roger Tuivasa-Sheck and Newcastle Knights captain Kalyn Ponga.
“It’s convenient journalism to connect any sport with Saudi Arabia because the perception is we have unlimited money and throw it ignorantly at whoever comes at us,” Townsend said. “That’s absolutely not the case and certainly not the reason I am here. “I’d hate to think how many emails I get a week from people wanting to sell the next big thing, the next sport technology, the next arena.”
Townsend also believes private equity fund CVC Capital, which has invested heavily in European rugby including the Six Nations, wouldn’t allow another investor to snap up rugby’s best talent. “I’d be surprised if CVC would sit back and let someone sweep up their product without putting up a fight,” he said.
As the Saudis’ representative on the DAZN board, Townsend looms as a key figure in future rights negotiations with the AFL, NRL and cricket.
News Corp, publisher of this masthead, announced last December it will have a minority equity interest of about 6 per cent in the sports streaming giant and one seat on the board.
Earlier this month, ARL Commission chairman Peter V’landys met DAZN directors, including founder and majority owner Sir Len Blavatnik, in New York.
While V’landys also met with Amazon and Netflix, the competitive tension between DAZN and Nine Entertainment Co is already starting to bubble.
Nine understands live sport is its future and wants more content for its online streaming service Stan, although many media analysts tell you it’s bringing a knife to a gunfight because DAZN has far deeper pockets.
DAZN or Nine will either overpay for the rights, or carve it up between themselves. The NRL, and V’landys, loom as the winners either way.
“As a director, I can’t comment on negotiations,” Townsend said.
“But DAZN’s investment in Foxtel means we have an invested interest in the sporting landscape in Australia. We want to see it thrive because that will help the DAZN business.”
Thanks Dan
Few observers would have noted the irony of Black Sabbath lead singer Ozzy Osbourne slipping off this mortal coil exactly a year out from the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.
Osborne performed at the closing ceremony at the last Games, which were held in his home city of Birmingham in 2022.
He played strong, too, thundering out the heavy metal band’s iconic song Paranoid before bellowing “Birmingham forever!” He then disappeared into a cloud of smoke. Fabulous stuff.
It’s easy to shit-pot the Commonwealth Games but when you are there, as I was in Birmingham, you appreciate the beauty of the event.
It’s less hectic than an Olympics, although no less important to those competing. The sight of lawn bowlers with medals won around their necks drinking pints with the punters at the Cricketers Arms, a 200-year-old pub in the town of Royal Leamington Spa, lives long in the memory.
Just as Osbourne will forever live in infamy for biting the head off a bat on stage, former Victorian premier Dan Andrews will be remembered as the politician who nearly killed the poor old Comm Games.
Andrews inexplicably decided midway through 2023 to pull out of hosting the Games, which cost the Victorian taxpayer $380m in compensation paid to the Commonwealth Games Federation.
“That disappointment is not going to fade quickly,” Australia’s chef de mission, Petria Thomas, said this week. “Particularly in the way it was done.”
Reports that Brisbane sprint sensation Gout Gout is considering a start in Glasgow makes you wonder what might have been if Andrews had been stronger.
Fake woke, or go broke
Last Saturday’s snap election in Tasmania hasn’t provided the answers the AFL was seeking about the future of the Macquarie Point stadium, the billion-dollar, 23,000-seat pleasure dome on which the Devils’ inclusion in the competition from 2028 is contingent.
At the time of writing, neither Labor nor the Liberals had formed a minority government.
While the AFL continues to hold Tasmania hostage over the project, the reverse is happening in Washington DC where President Donald Trump has threatened to block NFL franchise the Washington Commanders from getting a new billion-dollar, 65,000-seat pleasure dome of its own.
“I may put a restriction on them that if they don’t change the name back to the original ‘Washington Redskins’ and get rid of the ridiculous moniker ‘Washington Commanders’ I won’t make a deal for them to build a stadium in Washington,” Trump posted on his social media site.
There’s a misconception the Black Lives Matter movement was responsible for the “Redskins” nickname being retired in 2020 before Washington became the “Commanders” two years later.
In reality, there had been discussions about changing the name for more than a decade – and it was purely business.
FedEx, the stadium’s former naming rights sponsor, was threatening to pull its money. Nike, Target, Walmart, and Amazon had all stopped selling Washington merchandise.
Washington team owner Dan Snyder, who had been opposed to changing the name, was faced with a decision: pretend to go woke or go broke.
Head-knock dilemma
When Sydney Roosters hardman Victor Radley was sidelined earlier this year after failing his seventh head injury assessment in four years, the armchair neurologists demanded he should retire.
As Radley explained this week, several specialists, including leading neurologist Chris Levi, have given him the all-clear to keep playing following a suite of tests.
Retirement is usually the toughest and most personal of calls for an athlete, and even more so when concussion is at play.
Equally problematic is the decision to donate their brain to science.
Reporting about this issue requires a delicate touch, not belligerent grandstanding from on high. The Australian’s Jessica Halloran has led the way in this regard, humanising the plight of many footballers and their families across the codes.
It’s not easy journalism – you’re effectively blowing up Disneyland and not everyone wants to hear it – but it’s important.
Which brings us to a touching book written and self-published by Karen Johnson about her late husband Brian, a premiership-winning rugby league fullback and halfback for St George in the 1970s and ’80s.
Letters for Brian is a deeply personal account of her enduring love for her husband as he battled younger onset dementia and suspected chronic traumatic encephalopathy before his death at the age of 59.
The book, which includes letters Karen wrote to Brian when he was in rapid cognitive decline, is mostly about caring for someone with dementia – but makes several important points about CTE.
“I cut people off who wanted to ask me about head injuries from rugby league,” Karen writes. “I was not interested in class actions like they have in the US. Who do we blame if it is from a footy injury, anyway? Brian’s parents for registering him to play? A kid who tackled him? The Australian Rugby League itself? It’s just life.”
She then reveals, in a letter to her dying husband, why she would not donate his brain for research: “When you die, I would have to call the researchers, who would collect your body and return it, minus your brain, to a funeral director.”
Brian Johnson died at home, in his wife’s arms and surrounded by his family, in 2016.
The book is available via Amazon.
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