Peter Bills: Poor state of the Union cause for Aussie concern
Australia's Richard Brown reacts to another New Zealand try during last weekend's victory for the All Blacks in Melbourne. Photo: Reuters
WITHOUT wishing to put too fine a point on it – something the Aussies never like doing – a brutal fact has to be recorded: Australian rugby is in the soup.
It has nothing to do with last weekend’s defeat for the Wallabies at the hands of the all-conquering All Blacks. Fact is, they are likely to get another belting when they meet again in the Tri Nations/Bledisloe Cup match in Christchurch on Saturday.
If the Wallabies lose this weekend, it will be a ninth successive loss to the All Blacks, their fiercest rivals. Yet not even that stark, sorry statistic represents the depth of Australian rugby’s travails.
A marketing survey recently released in Sydney revealed that Australian Rugby Union’s (ARU) share of the sporting market has nearly halved in six years despite spending an alarming AUS$23m on the game. It has slipped to a perilous 13.7pc of the sporting interest market and is only the fourth most watched sport in the country.
This derisory figure has a disturbing corollary. When Rugby Union turned professional in 1995, the game in Australia commanded 22pc of the nation’s sporting audience. There was even talk of it overtaking Rugby League, a hitherto unimagined feat.
HOLLOW
Today, such talk has been rendered hollow. As one of Australia’s leading marketing men, Steve Allen, managing director of media planning company Fusion Strategy in Sydney, said: “As a sport, Rugby Union is going nowhere. It’s like a big yawn for most people.”
That view was confirmed when Australia’s ‘7’ TV network didn’t even bother to renew its television rights deal beyond the end of this season. Allen added: “It has done nothing for them.”
So Rugby Union in Australia has retreated to its core support base, the private schools and exclusive clubs, the likes of Eastwood, Sydney University and Randwick in the wealthy Eastern Suburbs, where a waterfront view apartment can cost you $3m and fish and chips in a swish, bistro-type restaurant almost as much.
Does this matter too much? Well yes, actually. For the blunt fact is, Rugby Union in Australia is under assault from all sides. AFL has a huge power base in the state of Victoria from which it has spread its sporting tentacles. Rugby League, once thought to be on a slippery slope, has been revived spectacularly. It might still be a game of mind-numbing boredom, but thousands still follow it with an almost religious zeal.
What is more, these sporting codes have the financial clout to lead invading armies into Union’s supposed territory. They flood the schools with their messages, their free kit and other assorted detritus of their games. They send the star names of their game into classrooms to beguile and entice youngsters to their code. Little old Rugby Union can offer few such enticements.
Even more disturbingly, Union has been dealt a tough lesson by its traditionally strongest support base: the Sydney business world. In recent years, Test matches involving the Wallabies have been played at the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games stadium, way out in the suburbs at Homebush.
It is a long slog from the city by train or car and the wealthy business community, who hold the dollars that the Australian Rugby Union so desperately crave, has made it clear it doesn’t like the venue. Especially on a wet Saturday night.
So, this being professional Rugby Union, when the sponsors say jump, rugby says ‘how high’? In this case, to the extent of agreeing that most future Test matches played against the likes of Ireland, England, Wales and France will be staged at the Sydney Football Stadium (SFS), a stone’s throw from Paddington, one of the close-in city suburbs.
Now the SFS doesn’t boast anything like the capacity of the Olympic Stadium, or ANZ Stadium as it is now known. But it is so much closer to real rugby areas and the city, and, in this game, the men who hold the financial accounts hold sway.
It is a revealing climb-down on the part of the embattled ARU, even though Tri Nations Tests will continue to be held at the ANZ when in Sydney. They know they have no choice. And their CEO John O’Neill admits that he faces a hand of cards invariably stacked against him and his organisation.
“We are back to where we were 15 years ago when the code had just turned professional,” he said.
It would be over-egging the issue to say that Rugby Union in Australia is on borrowed time. The national team still has some fine players and others are pressing to follow their path into the coveted Wallabies fold.
But at a time when the IRB likes to boast of the exponential spread of its game around the world, the fact is one of its supposed bastions is crumbling. And that ought to concern us all.
- Peter Bills
