New Zealand Rugby chair Dame Patsy Reddy, Scott Robertson and NZR CEO Mark Robinson speak to the media. Photo / Mark Mitchell
New Zealand Rugby chair Dame Patsy Reddy, Scott Robertson and NZR CEO Mark Robinson speak to the media. Photo / Mark Mitchell
OPINION
It turns out that Australian rugby can be direct, confrontational and aggressive after all, and deliver the killer blow.
Six Australian states have ganged up to demand that Rugby Australia chair Hamish McLennan sling his hook after his disastrous Eddie Jones episode, and resign from his post.
It’s abig play by the state bodies, but not unexpected nor unjustified after McLennan effectively gave himself a captain’s pick to fire the previous Wallabies coach Dave Rennie a year ago and install Jones on a mission to root out the endemic weakness in the player development system and rebuild the Wallabies with a fair-dinkum, new breed of Eddie-styled Aussie diggers and battlers.
The theory wasn’t so bad, but the execution of “operation Eddie” was wild and ultimately embarrassing as Jones almost became a parody, and the Wallabies, from being a team full of promise under Rennie, were a rabble at the World Cup.
McLennan gambled and he lost – and now his constituents want him out. The cut-throat nature of how this has played out illustrates two key problems that are plaguing high-level sport globally.
The first is that so many codes, leagues and national bodies are being held back by a lack of good governance and strong executive leadership.
Rugby Australia chairman Hamish McLennan. Photo / Getty Images
Australian rugby is in a horrible mess, but they are by no means the only ones.
The Welsh Rugby Union is rebuilding after an independent review found some aspects of the organisation’s culture to be sexist, misogynistic, racist and homophobic.
World Rugby had to remove its vice-chairman Bernard Laporte in November 2022 after he was found guilty of corruption charges, and the Scottish Rugby Union have just issued an apology to the family of former international Siobhan Cattigan, who died in 2021.
Three English Premiership clubs have gone bust in the past 18 months; the biggest problem the sport faces is finding the right people to run it.
This is as true in New Zealand as it is everywhere else, and the situation here isn’t too dissimilar to the one in Australia, it’s just the dynamics are softer, more measured and controlled in how the problem is being tackled.
In late-August, an independent review into the governance of rugby found the set-up is not fit for purpose, and it recommended a clean-out of the current board, to be replaced by a new one composed entirely of independent directors chosen with specific and identified skillsets in mind.
The review didn’t cast judgment on the performance of the incumbent executive team at New Zealand Rugby but did say: “The chief executive’s reporting dashboard has 48 Key Performance Indicators; most of them are tactical at best and lacking measurability.
“There is simply too much indistinguishable detail coming to the board.”
The inference is clear: no one can tell whether the CEO is performing to expectation or not. This highlights the second problem of transparency, accountability and process if there is suspicion that performance objectives are not being met.
It may seem brutal that the Australians have publicly asked McLennan to step down, but what were the alternatives?
The other Rugby Australia board members, despite the attempts to portray their chair as a lone wolf, are complicit in the events of the past year – and if they claim they aren’t then they are admitting to being guilty of failing to control McLennan.
Either way, the states obviously felt they needed to take decisive action on their own terms and that’s not as radical as it may appear.
New Zealand’s controlled approach, after all, has so far led to nothing happening.
New Zealand Rugby chief executive Mark Robinson. Photo / Photosport
A review has highlighted the faults with the system and while there is broad agreement across all levels of the game that the governance structure needs to change, so far there has been no definitive action plan revealed.
The provinces haven’t given any firm indication about whether they accept all, none or some of the findings, and nearly three months have elapsed since the report was published. There is now an obvious danger that a major piece of investigative work conducted by skilled and credible people is dismissed or ignored, despite there being a consensus that the arrival of Silver Lake as a third-party investor and the creation of a new commercial entity which houses all the game’s assets has created an overwhelming need for some kind of governance restructure.
New Zealand has given Australia many lessons on the art of being direct and confrontational on the field, but now it would appear the latter has shown the former the value of being like that off the field.
Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He has won multiple awards for journalism and has written several books about sport.
