Talking Footy

NRL's Gaza strip
Rebecca Wilson
The Daily Telegraph
February 25, 201212:00AM

FORMER AFL star David Schwarz co-hosts a sports radio show in Melbourne each afternoon where he and his colleagues admit to being very much more attune to the ways of the AFL than rugby league.

Each week they call me and find it difficult to conceal their horror at the stories that emerge from Sydney's league scene - the backstabbing, the personality clashes and the undermining of head office.

This week, they found it hard to believe that within minutes of the new commission being sworn in to office, 16 club bosses had opted to form their own organisation to operate outside the parameters of the new order.

Schwarz almost begged me to tell him it was not true, that these blokes who had pushed so hard to have an independent commission could have acted so early to undermine its assert their own authority.

The AFL commission is a bunch of footy fanatics with vast experience in business and a deep passion for the game. They have the respect of all the AFL clubs and go about their business in a way that inspires confidence in the game's stakeholders.

This week proved that the cultural divide between AFL and rugby league could not be wider. League might have a sparkling new commission with fresh faces and a shiny new building to house its now united inhabitants.

The commission even stamped its authority early with an announcement to mercifully revert to the old finals system so we actually see the best teams compete for the trophy in late September.

This is all for show. As the 16 club bosses showed the world this week, league has an underbelly that remains alarmingly subversive and self-interested.

The subculture of power mongering, of shoring up positions is alive and flourishing in club land.

Commission chairman John Grant has acted quickly to put his face in front of the cameras.

At this week's season launch he talked up the new finals system and boasted about the season ahead.

But he looked like a rabbit in the spotlight when he learned of the new club committee.

After months of consulting with the same club bosses in a supposed climate of conciliation, he had not been told what they had planned and neither had David Gallop.

No matter how you dress it up, league is still a deeply divided sport with the same old powerbrokers turning their attention to Grant and his seven commission mates. The club bosses who met this week are not going to let go of how they believe the sport should be managed.

Even though they have legally binding contracts with the National Rugby League, they still want to dictate who gets the funds from the impending television deal.

They have virtually said they would hold a gun to the NRL's head if they did not get what they wanted.

The unspoken threat is that the club bosses will form a breakaway movement and run their own competition if the NRL does things.

The 16 clubs have been convinced by several paranoid chiefs (keen to hold on to a semblance of their former power) that the NRL hordes money and siphons it away from those who need it most.

This, of course, is nonsense. But the real story does not seem to matter.

The commission has a chance to sift out underperforming clubs and set benchmarks for their survival.

The committee formed this week will undermine that process. With a week to go before a ball is kicked, league's problems took just a few pre-season days to resurface.

The commission may have created some optimism with naive observers keen to see signs of a clean slate but, as I said weeks ago, changing the names on the door means nothing when the personnel inside are the same.

Back in the mid-'90s, a group of club chiefs still bitter over Super League took their places in the ARL and a few years later agreed to form a new partnership called the National Rugby League.

They had seats on new NRL boards and promised peace. A decade later, they forced the old NRL towards an independent commission.

The faceless men had their way but it wasn't enough.

They know who they are.

Welcome to league's Gaza strip, Mr Grant. Nothing much has changed at all.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/sport/ ... 6281009111

Our house: how league has stood its ground

AT the NRL's impressive season launch on Wednesday night, there were the usual nervous titters. Predictable jokes about Kieran Foran and Daly Cherry-Evans being found chained naked to a light post the next morning. Old gags about whether you would prefer to be the face of the NRL, or the face of the Bermuda Triangle.

But, as fraught as it would be to suggest the NRL's worst behavioural issues are behind them, this time the jokes seemed misplaced. Very Old League. With the spiffy League Central launched by a new commission before a crowd that talked excitedly about the intriguing season ahead, it was an occasion when the game was rightly, and deservedly, upbeat.

That fact alone - that guests chatted earnestly about the game, rather than off-field catastrophes or political intrigue - was an affirmation of the NRL's renaissance. Bennett at Newcastle. Gould at Penrith. Hasler at Canterbury. Carney at Cronulla. Before a season when you could nominate six genuine premiership chances, and worry you had left a couple out, the excitement around the NRL is palpable.

How refreshing for an often browbeaten administration that, five days before the first game, their greatest problem - fingers firmly crossed - has been placating fans who could not get tickets to sold-out games? In this refreshing environment comes great responsibility - they must make up for significant time lost, or wasted, and give the game the prosperity its vast support should ensure.

With his neatly clipped beard, ARL Commission chairman John Grant looks more like a scientist or a maths teacher than the robust winger who once took Wayne Bennett's place in the Kangaroos line-up. However, already his commission has acted assertively by replacing the failed McIntrye finals system.

The strangely - perhaps mischievously - timed announcement that the clubs were to form their own association on the eve of the launch did not please anyone at League Central. Why, they quite reasonably wondered, would clubs who are represented by the new commission form a body that seems to be in an adversarial relationship with itself? Then again, you might ask the same thing about the federal government.

The suggestion is that the clubs, particularly those not delighted by the game's administration in recent years, want to keep the heat on David Gallop - again, surely, a task for the independent commission. Still, whether the pressure comes from a commission which is fully briefed about the circumstances of administrative decisions, or from club powerbrokers protecting vested interests, Gallop now surely has a much firmer hand on the tiller.

In the past, Gallop might rightly have complained his hands were tied by the game's convoluted ownership structure and anachronistic club tribalism. Now, unfettered, he will be fairly judged on his ability to deliver an improved television rights deal and to put in place other big ticket items such as bolstering heartland support, improving stadiums and expanding the competition.

At the same time, there is a good case to say much of the positive work upon which the NRL had embarked has been overshadowed in recent years by behavioural issues, the painstaking process of establishing the commission and the petty inter- and intra-club feuds that provide more eyecatching headlines than the relative mundane and time-consuming grassroots work.

This year's successful All Stars game, and the recent community carnival where NRL players engaged with about 115,000 children, are examples of initiatives that, in a more positive environment, are enjoying wider coverage - at least until a player sent on one such missionary expedition is caught pants-down in a local nightclub.

Perhaps because the NRL has reasserted its position, or because the AFL's expensive long-term strategy is yet to bite, the invading forces are not yet proving as formidable as anticipated. The AFL's hope is that, with two teams in Sydney, both the number of games, and the amount of media exposure, would double.

So far, as some at the Swans mutter darkly, the AFL's media coverage has simply been re-allocated. Currently, the new Giants are enjoying the spotlight. Later in the season, when the Swans again press for the finals, and GWS suffer predictably heavy defeats, that trend will be reversed.

GWS made one crushing blow in their bid to dominate the west by giving their No.1 ticket to Melissa Doyle (a breakfast TV host who formerly pledged her allegiance to the red and white). Apparently, Kevin Rudd is not the only one relying on ''Kochie's Australia'' for support.

But, as the NRL boldly asserted at its launch, Sydney is again indisputably their house. One now standing on stronger foundations.

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/rugby-l ... z1nM5iv2Vo

cooee wrote:

Bitter News Limited. They hate that it only took three weeks for the Commission to achieve more for the game (dumping the McIntrye system) than the NRL partnership did in their entire reign.

If you want news that isn't based on bitterness read FairFax.

The commission even stamped its authority early with an announcement to mercifully revert to the old finals system so we actually see the best teams compete for the trophy in late September.

This is all for show. As the 16 club bosses showed the world this week, league has an underbelly that remains alarmingly subversive and self-interested.

The subculture of power mongering, of shoring up positions is alive and flourishing in club land.

Commission chairman John Grant has acted quickly to put his face in front of the cameras.

At this week's season launch he talked up the new finals system and boasted about the season ahead.

But he looked like a rabbit in the spotlight when he learned of the new club committee.

After months of consulting with the same club bosses in a supposed climate of conciliation, he had not been told what they had planned and neither had David Gallop.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/sport/ ... 6281009111

The commission may have created some optimism with naive observers keen to see signs of a clean slate but, as I said weeks ago, changing the names on the door means nothing when the personnel inside are the same.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/sport/ ... 6281009111

Beaussie wrote:

So no comment cooee to the questions I put to you? Has anything really changed with the ARLC?

What about the following from the article in the OP?

The commission may have created some optimism with naive observers keen to see signs of a clean slate but, as I said weeks ago, changing the names on the door means nothing when the personnel inside are the same.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/sport/ ... 6281009111

Beaussie wrote:

Gees louise, so much for the new "independent commission". NRL clubs don't seem to want a bar of it. How embarrassing for David Gallp an John Grant to learn that the clubs are actively working behind the scenes to undermine the independence of the commission. What a farce.

NRL's Gaza strip
Rebecca Wilson
The Daily Telegraph
February 25, 201212:00AM

FORMER AFL star David Schwarz co-hosts a sports radio show in Melbourne each afternoon where he and his colleagues admit to being very much more attune to the ways of the AFL than rugby league.

Each week they call me and find it difficult to conceal their horror at the stories that emerge from Sydney's league scene - the backstabbing, the personality clashes and the undermining of head office.

This week, they found it hard to believe that within minutes of the new commission being sworn in to office, 16 club bosses had opted to form their own organisation to operate outside the parameters of the new order.

Schwarz almost begged me to tell him it was not true, that these blokes who had pushed so hard to have an independent commission could have acted so early to undermine its assert their own authority.

The AFL commission is a bunch of footy fanatics with vast experience in business and a deep passion for the game. They have the respect of all the AFL clubs and go about their business in a way that inspires confidence in the game's stakeholders.

This week proved that the cultural divide between AFL and rugby league could not be wider. League might have a sparkling new commission with fresh faces and a shiny new building to house its now united inhabitants.

The commission even stamped its authority early with an announcement to mercifully revert to the old finals system so we actually see the best teams compete for the trophy in late September.

This is all for show. As the 16 club bosses showed the world this week, league has an underbelly that remains alarmingly subversive and self-interested.

The subculture of power mongering, of shoring up positions is alive and flourishing in club land.

Commission chairman John Grant has acted quickly to put his face in front of the cameras.

At this week's season launch he talked up the new finals system and boasted about the season ahead.

But he looked like a rabbit in the spotlight when he learned of the new club committee.

After months of consulting with the same club bosses in a supposed climate of conciliation, he had not been told what they had planned and neither had David Gallop.

No matter how you dress it up, league is still a deeply divided sport with the same old powerbrokers turning their attention to Grant and his seven commission mates. The club bosses who met this week are not going to let go of how they believe the sport should be managed.

Even though they have legally binding contracts with the National Rugby League, they still want to dictate who gets the funds from the impending television deal.

They have virtually said they would hold a gun to the NRL's head if they did not get what they wanted.

The unspoken threat is that the club bosses will form a breakaway movement and run their own competition if the NRL does things.

The 16 clubs have been convinced by several paranoid chiefs (keen to hold on to a semblance of their former power) that the NRL hordes money and siphons it away from those who need it most.

This, of course, is nonsense. But the real story does not seem to matter.

The commission has a chance to sift out underperforming clubs and set benchmarks for their survival.

The committee formed this week will undermine that process. With a week to go before a ball is kicked, league's problems took just a few pre-season days to resurface.

The commission may have created some optimism with naive observers keen to see signs of a clean slate but, as I said weeks ago, changing the names on the door means nothing when the personnel inside are the same.

Back in the mid-'90s, a group of club chiefs still bitter over Super League took their places in the ARL and a few years later agreed to form a new partnership called the National Rugby League.

They had seats on new NRL boards and promised peace. A decade later, they forced the old NRL towards an independent commission.

The faceless men had their way but it wasn't enough.

They know who they are.

Welcome to league's Gaza strip, Mr Grant. Nothing much has changed at all.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/sport/ ... 6281009111

cooee wrote:

Beaussie wrote:

So no comment cooee to the questions I put to you? Has anything really changed with the ARLC?

What about the following from the article in the OP?

The commission may have created some optimism with naive observers keen to see signs of a clean slate but, as I said weeks ago, changing the names on the door means nothing when the personnel inside are the same.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/sport/ ... 6281009111

Other then David Gallop no one that was previously on the NRL partnership board remains. The Commissioners are all INDEPENDENT from NEWS LIMITED and the ARL.

Gallop no longer has two masters that he must please, instead just the Commissioners who's role is to foster and develop the game. Decisions will now be made in the best interest of the game and no longer restricted by one side not wanting the other to get the upper hand.



Previously the ARL had a 50% stake in the NRL and full controlled ARL Development, the State bodies and representative games. Everything now falls under the ARL Commission.

NSWAFL wrote:

And the clubs are already revolting I heard, so nothing changes.

NSWAFL wrote:

Come on, Cooee, out with it!