If it is such a great game, why is it not more popular in Australia. These "clowns" have only been around for a short while, comparatively speaking. The game virtually died out at the international level in the early post-war years, we were saved by two enormously popular Fijian tours. Those teams played open, attractive, unstructured rugby. They drew ecstatic support from people who were just not all that interested in our game.
We have bobbed along ever since, sometimes thriving, comparatively, more often struggling.
It is not the game that is so wonderful, it is the culture of the game and the people who support and play it that is wonderful. If the game was so wonderful, things would be very very different.
You continue to go back to the amateur era and highlight the Fiji tours. I have deliberately and explicitly left the amateur era out of any criticism of the administrators. I've done this for two reasons; firstly because the world has changed and it's not valid to compare amateur and professional and secondly because amateur era officials did their best for no reward and put in their time after working all day at a real job.
You ask why other sports have thrived while we have gone backwards. Simply because other sports haven't just sat back and thought "our game is wonderful, we've always had plenty of young players, we don't have to do anything much, we'll just sit back and let it happen" What other sports have done is gone out and promoted themselves in areas not normally associated with their sport. They've actively gone into schools, as BAR indicated in his post and provided a specific example (I know of many such instances, including my old primary and high schools). League, Aussie Rules and soccer in a co-ordinated way driven from the top, have aggressively targeted areas where rugby used to be pre-eminent, while we just sat back and expected the players to keep playing rugby because they always did. Not a peep from highly paid professional administrators, no action, no plans, no strategy.
I realise that your view is that (a) rugby is doomed to fail in Australia and (b) that there is no correlation between the competence and performance of the administration to the performance of the organisation (interesting from someone who was involved in management BTW)
But, let's leave aside bigger, more cashed up sports. Let's compare ourselves to hockey, which in comparison to rugby is run off the smell of an oily rag. Constantly approaching schools to see if they are interested and will come to any school with paid DOs (not volunteers), with full kit (balls, sticks, shin pads & goalie suit) and run PE/sport sessions for the school. Guess what, Manly Warringah junior hockey has increased it's playing numbers by 400% in 5 years - 90 players 5 years ago and 360 registered last year. There will be another increase this year as I note that we've entered more teams.
I can tell you that Hockey Australia would have loved to have had $30 million dollars in the bank 15 years ago, coupled with the recognition that rugby had in Australia 1999 RWC champions, 2001 Lions tour and hosting RWC 2003. Talk about an organisation having a hand full of trumps to play. And what did the clowns do? Blew it all that's what.
