INSTEAD OF STRENGTHENING AUSTRALIAN RUGBY, THE ARU'S NEW COMPETITION RISKS UNDERMINING ITS VERY FOUNDATIONS.

THE FOOTBALL club is a tight unit in Australia. The NRL understands this. Their slogan "That’s my team" is a
call to the club … to the tribe. The community roots that withered in the late 1990s are deepening again. Manly are back at Brookvale, St George at Kogarah, the Tigers at Leichhardt. The old hills are packed week in and week out.

Last year, over three million people attended NRL games. But while league grows fat on tribalism, rugby union is moving in the opposite direction. At the end of May, the Australian Rugby Union’s (ARU) three-day summit on a new national club competition came to a close and important people were happy. The process had been intense. The 70 delegates had worked over three 12-hour stints. All mobile phones had been confiscated at the door. There had been no voting. Instead, according to an ARU press release, everyone "worked together with a commonly agreed aim."

The outcome was simple: from 2007 a new competition will form a third tier in Australian rugby, filling the perceived void between club rugby and the Super 14. Eight teams – three from NSW, two from Queensland and one each from the ACT, Perth and Melbourne – will face off between July 28 and October 14. These new teams will, of course, be amalgams of existing clubs. A window from March until mid-July will be left open for club rugby. Emerging from the summit, ARU chief executive Gary Flowers was jubilant.

"It’s the next big thing in Australian rugby," he said. "We did a lot of research, looking at our competitors in the southern and northern hemispheres and at information about the number of elite games those countries are playing. What we realised was that performance at international level isn’t just a stroke of luck. It doesn’t just happen because people are born gifted. It happens because talent is identified and directed to play in the right competitions." In the bonhomie of the moment, Flowers added that the model had been signed off and endorsed by the rugby clubs. But if this is the case, why are some of Sydney’s great clubs raging? Why would the president of Randwick Rugby, Ian North, make the following comment? "I would imagine it’s going to be the beginning of the end for club rugby. Nearly all the successful clubs have budgets somewhere between $600,000 and $1 million, and you can’t do that without sponsorship. If [the new competition] cuts the window of opportunity for the sponsors to be seen on TV and things like that, they’re obviously going to drop off."

Why was Bob Shield, the clubs’ representative on the NSW Rugby Union board and a firm supporter of the new competition, unanimously voted from his office by his fellow club presidents? Shield’s vacant position has been filled by the president of the Eastern Suburbs club, Alan Williamson, and his views on the new competition are unequivocal.

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