Fair To Say

As a Victorian writing a general sports blog, I feel like I’m going to be seen as picking unmercifully on football codes more popular in the northern states… but if they didn’t have so many deep-seated problems then I wouldn’t be able to write these articles, now would I? John O’Neill, former and once again saviour of Antipodean rugby union, has been getting a lot of press lately for gobbing off about many of the problems he is facing, hoping to get a little bit of help from other stakeholders via bully pulpit. Admiring puff pieces like this one in the Australian only go so far in papering over the cracks in union, however.

O’Neill must be feeling a bit like Kevin Rudd at the moment. Both are the national managers of global businesses, working hard to gut the local business of its unprofitable and wasteful excesses. Unfortunately, both are getting swept away by forces they can not control, and no matter how good an actuarial job they do with the books in our corner of the world, events may conspire to overtake them. While Rudd’s fortunes sway with Reserve Bank meetings in New York, wars over Nigerian oil fields and the state of the polar ice cap in Antarctica, the tectonics of O’Neill’s world are increasingly centred around Europe. Rugby is a globalised sport, as is rugby league, and both codes are suffering greatly from poaching by cashed-up European clubs. 16 All Blacks in 18 months have been lured away from the southern hemisphere competitions by the euro vision.

Like any good business manager, O’Neill has been looking for ways to rationalise his expenses and grow locally. One such way would be to merge with rugby league, as he floated a couple of weeks ago. It makes good financial sense at a broad level, and if there is any sport that is subject to the siren call of the almighty dollar it is rugby league - that is why the code was created in the first place, after all. The NRL is in the pocket of News Limited, however, so unless the Murdoch family decided to pull the pin from their local TV media interests entirely like the Packers have, I can’t see that happening.

No, unfortunately the fate of rugby union is to become less and less relevant in the medium term. Australia has flogged off most of its assets to foreign raiders in the business world - oil, gas, minerals, property, media - so it is such a stretch to think that in five years the ARU will “merge” (i.e. be taken over) by European interests, to become a feeder competition with no more global pull than the A-League? John O’Neill has the whip out to prevent that scenario happening, but the horse is foaming at the mouth.