In year 7 of the Force story we can't afford to do a restart. By all means inject local talent into the team but these players need to be surrounded by experienced heads. If the Force want to get more bums on seats, more media support, more kids playing rugby in local comps they simply have to win. Everyone likes a winner. More attractive to come across to the West if you see there is a successful team and program in place and maybe a top line coach. That isn't evident at the moment.
100% right Moono.
Just look at the Force's year-on-year mediocrity of outcome as per Bret Harris' article in the The Australian today. TOCC last year supplied the crowd figures to show the annual year-on-year decline in Force gate numbers. And good/great players have left or are leaving faster than they are replenished. The 'we're on the up and a new side' line that worked OK for recruiting in 2006-9 etc is fully bankrupt now.
As Waylon has noted, the wealth level and natural local rugby-loving base population in WA are both well on the up. But the Force is clearly on the down.
The board of Rugby WA and, partly, the ARU standing by wringing its hands but doing nothing effective, are wholly responsible for this outcome.
There won't be an ARC II any time soon, forget that as the apparently saving mechanism.
What is required is this IMO:
1. The whole Rugby WA model must be urgently opened up to a radical infusion of local private equity and the dynamic, ambitious business competence that would come with this complete reconstruction of board and management. The money and State-rooted pride in WA is absolutely there to do this easily.
2. A world-class coaching group must be appointed from 2013, at the latest. Look at what White is achieving already and ditto Link in his first year. Top notch specialist support coaches are just as important, and the money must be found via 1 above to hire them. Hiring RG was the moment of truth for the current WA rugby board -
if they could not do what the ACT RU has so laudably done and have the corporate vision, honesty and guts to go for proven class, not an ARU hand-me-down with wholly unproven credentials and at best a medicore record at national level, then all was revealed as to their own notable lack of class as competent guardians of our great code in a key state for Australian rugby.
3. The ARU salary cap and squad size caps are worst imaginable excellence-of-achievement constraints for all but NSW and QLD. They will kill the Force's ability to recruit the elite team and related depth of back up needed. They must be abolished or seriously modified if the ARU has any hope of building an S15 Conf where, say, any one of 4 teams could genuinely vie for Finals or a GF, and this must surely be the goal, not the current '...2 teams maybe can just get there, maybe...'. The core problem with the ARU is that it is more interested in preserving its own elite and their requisite privileges and outmoded prejudices than they are in strategically revitalising Australian rugby out of the long-distance memory of the glory days and into the brilliant sunshine of where modern Aus rugby really could sit if the right structural and management competencies were applied (with suitable urgency).
In short, nothing short of radical structural change is needed in WA rugby. Incremental tinkering and Pocock-hugging symbolism will gradually mutate the Force into a local joke and may irrevocably remove the chance to rebuild soon enough to achieve something far greater and something capable of a good w-l ratio and the credible S15 Finals opportunities that the proud sports lovers of the great State of WA so rightly expect, and indeed could have with the right actions being taken.
