Add Category
Former Australian great Stephen Moore has said urgent action is needed to save rugby in this country following the Wallabies' disastrous World Cup demise.
Australia missed the quarterfinals in France on a countback, but had they scraped through it would have only papered over cracks that have been years in the making, according to Moore.
The 129-Test hooker said the sport needed a reset, including cutting Super Rugby teams, or Australia risked becoming a second-tier rugby nation — an embarrassing prospect with the British and Irish Lions coming in 2025 and the next World Cup to be held here in 2027.
Rugby Australia (RA) will conduct an independent review following the dual champions' failure to advance from the pool rounds for the first time.
Record losses to Wales and Fiji, and coach Eddie Jones being forced to deny he was set to jump ship to Japan less than a year into his five-year contract, were the low points of an ugly campaign.
However, barring exposure of having lied to his bosses over an alleged Japan job interview, Jones is set to survive, with defiant RA chairman Hamish McLennan and chief executive Phil Waugh already voicing their support.
Moore, who played in three World Cups including captaining the Wallabies to a loss to New Zealand in the 2015 final, was disappointed but not entirely surprised by the performance.
"It's been alarming the way the team's gone backwards," a frustrated Moore said.
"It's really been in the last couple of years that we've really slipped down into that bordering on being a second tier side, so it's been a rapid decline."
He said the rushed recruitment of Jones, his misguided youth policy and his misfiring game plan had contributed to their World Cup failure but the problems were more widespread.
Moore said the sport needed an overhaul from top to bottom including a Super Rugby restructure, despite RA stating their opposition with lucrative broadcast dollars at stake.
He felt money should be redirected from Melbourne and Perth's Super Rugby teams into those cities' club scenes, for them to field strong sides in a lower tier competition, while more resources were put into resurrecting country rugby in NSW and Queensland.
Moore also wanted RA to stop chasing "shiny new things" such as NRL stars.
"Five Australian teams is not working for us from a performance point of view, from an entertainment point either, so we need to look at different ways of doing it," the 40-year-old said.
"I think the trigger for all these things is that we just we're not improving, so we have to keep exploring how we can get better and we seem to be keen to just keep going down the same path and expecting something different to happen.
"We've got to be pretty courageous about what the future looks like, because we're at that point now, aren't we?
"I think the code in Australia has probably gone to another low, so we really have to do something urgently."
While Waugh has trumpeted centralisation as part of the solution, Moore expected resistance to change from the states, who he felt had lost trust with the RA hierarchy.
"The stakeholders of the game need to decide if the people running the game are going to be able to get us out the other end. If that's 'yes', then great, but if it's 'no', we need to know now, because this is the time for the change.
"We can say we just need to centralise everything but I can guarantee you the support for that will be limited because Australian rugby just hasn't got their own backyard in order enough for the trust to be there for the stakeholders to hand the keys over."
AAP
Sports content to make you think... or allow you not to. A newsletter delivered each Friday.