Brainstrust has indicated that there are risks in moving to a Saturday. Rugby can't afford to take private school kids for granted. Competitive sports are better resourced and looking to further expand into rugby's home territory.
The ARU, unfortunately, doesn't have the resources to take on the NRL, the AFL and FFA. The ARU's primary asset is that rugby is a truly international game that Australia can excel at. While soccer is an international game that we are minnows at. While we are the world champions at rugby league and AFL, no one else plays them. (away game at Cape Town v away game at Campbelltown, having been to both I prefer Cape Town)
Unfortunately the bar is set incredibly high for rugby, we need to beat our nearest neighbours consistently the world's best rugby team - being second in the world is failure. Whereas in AFL and league coming second is pretty much impossible.
Rugby has to play a defensive game until it is better resourced. Its best bet is to develop those players more likely to stick with it. Whilst some league players can recognise rugby's inherent superiority as a game, rugby doesn't have the resources to throw at them to the same extent that league does.
The environment that rugby faces is different to what it was 20 years ago, trying to turn the clock back won't work, it will just leave the game more exposed to its competitive threats.
Well there are risks in anything - moving from Saturday to Sunday was a risk and if the decline in teams and players in the 15 years since it happened are anything to go by the risk hasn't paid off.
Rugby faces the same issues as all sports in attracting and retaining players. It's been said on this thread before, but the big problem facing rugby is that most of our district clubs reflect Sydney of 1914 not 2014. As the city expanded from the 1970s onwards, there was no plan or no effort made into moving with the population and to establish a rugby presence in growth areas. Not to say that we had to be bigger than league, just that we needed a presence similar to what we have in other parts of the city. I'm lucky - there are 4 junior rugby clubs within 15 mins of where I live and every primary school in the area is convered by a junior club. There are many places in western and south-western Sydney where there are no junior clubs within 45-60 mins and most primary aged kids have no local rugby option at all.
What rugby administrators did, was to rely on the private school system to develop most of the elite talent. This was fine in the amateur era when 8 GPS and 6 CAS schools in Sydney and a similar number in Brisbane could produce enough good players to keep things going - supplemented by players who had come the the club system/state school system. But in the professional era this isn't going to work and the club system (which once operated from 9am-4.30pm every Saturday) has now reached crisis point. Read the first post of this thread - which is correspondence from SJRU to its clubs - even they've recognised the problem.
I don't really buy the resources argument - it's easy to look at AFL and league and say that they have more money than us, which they do. But there are plenty of sports with a lower profile and less resources than rugby who have managed to move with Sydney and establish themselves right across the city. As you know my daughter plays hockey - junior numbers have tripled in the past 5 years and hockey has nowhere near the resources that rugby does.
If you take out sports which need water to take place like sailing and rowing, rugby is one of the few sports which is not spread uniformly across the city. We're big on the upper north shore, holding our own in places like the northern beaches, but almost invisible in many parts of Sydney. And with the exception of rowing, we're the only sport that I know of where the club system takes second place to the school system. In other sports, the school systems are the icing on the cake, with rugby it's the cake. We're actually competing against ourselves as well as other sports in a way.
No easy answers and it's harder to fix than it was to break in the first place.
