Rugby Australia is using the Wallabies’ World Cup woes as a catalyst to push hard for reform in the game’s high-performance structures, aiming for a centralised model.

“We want them to be competitive, we want to have the local support behind us, the whole country behind us, as opposed to AFL and rugby league supporters laughing at us and putting us down - which is what is happening at the moment,” Lynagh said.

Some argue Australia needs to consider reducing its number of professional teams from five, and Lynagh said that the success of the Wallabies in his career was partly due to the team being drawn from just two states - NSW and Queensland. Lynagh has two son playing professionally - Tom plays for Queensland and Louis plays for Harlequins in England.

“Like Leinster, they play together a lot, they know each other really well, they gel together and we seem to have lost that a little bit now with having five teams in Super Rugby and competing against New Zealand and South Africa when they were in the competition,” he said.

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“It’s tough and we’re not winning a lot against those teams. Having five teams has really disappeared the playing togetherness, we just don’t have the playing population to fill these teams.

“Maybe there’s going to be some tough decisions having to come up as to how we structure the whole situation in Australia and I’m afraid the results at this World Cup have shown the current system hasn’t been working for a while and it’s going to take some time for any changes to come to fruition, but something has to happen, we can’t continue this downward spiral.

“In Australia we have a federated system and states are their own little fiefdoms and they don’t like each other and don’t trust Rugby Australia.

“There’s got to be a change in how we’re doing those things. They are big, bold decisions that will not be popular but if we don’t there will be real problem in going the same way we’re going ... there’s a real possibility of Australian rugby disappearing down a big sinkhole.”

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