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Moore says 'this is the time for the change' in Australian rugby

Australia captain Stephen Moore and vice-captain Michael Hooper

Former Australia great Stephen Moore says urgent action is needed to save rugby in this country following the Wallabies’ disastrous World Cup demise.

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Australia missed the quarter-finals 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.

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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.

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“It’s been alarming the way the team’s gone backwards,” a frustrated Moore told AAP.

“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.”

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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 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.

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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.”

Kicks

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1:3.9
Kick To Pass Ratio
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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.”

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Comments

2 Comments
D
Don M 439 days ago

Sick of this doomsday stuff.

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G
GrahamVF 16 minutes ago
Does South Africa have a future in European competition?

"has SA actually EVER helped to develop another union to maturity like NZ has with Japan," yes - Argentina. You obviously don't know the history of Argentinian rugby. SA were touring there on long development tours in the 1950's

We continued the Junior Bok tours to the Argentine through to the early 70's

My coach at Grey High was Giepie Wentzel who toured Argentine as a fly half. He told me about how every Argentinian rugby club has pictures of Van Heerden and Danie Craven on prominent display. Yes we have developed a nation far more than NZ has done for Japan. And BTW Sa players were playing and coaching in Japan long before the Kiwis arrived. Fourie du Preez and many others were playing there 15 years ago.


"Isaac Van Heerden's reputation as an innovative coach had spread to Argentina, and he was invited to Buenos Aires to help the Pumas prepare for their first visit to South Africa in 1965.[1][2] Despite Argentina faring badly in this tour,[2] it was the start of a long and happy relationship between Van Heerden and the Pumas. Izak van Heerden took leave from his teaching post in Durban, relocated to Argentina, learnt fluent Spanish, and would revolutionise Argentine play in the late 1960s, laying the way open for great players such as Hugo Porta.[1][2] Van Heerden virtually invented the "tight loose" form of play, an area in which the Argentines would come to excel, and which would become a hallmark of their playing style. The Pumas repaid the initial debt, by beating the Junior Springboks at Ellis Park, and emerged as one of the better modern rugby nations, thanks largely to the talents of this Durban schoolmaster.[1]"


After the promise made by Junior Springbok manager JF Louw at the end of a 12-game tour to Argentina in 1959 – ‘I will do everything to ensure we invite you to tour our country’ – there were concerns about the strength of Argentinian rugby. South African Rugby Board president Danie Craven sent coach Izak van Heerden to help the Pumas prepare and they repaid the favour by beating the Junior Springboks at Ellis Park.

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J
JW 6 hours ago
Does South Africa have a future in European competition?

I rated Lowe well enough to be an AB. Remember we were picking the likes of George Bridge above such players so theres no disputing a lot of bad decisions have been made by those last two coaches. Does a team like the ABs need a finicky winger who you have to adapt and change a lot of your style with to get benefit from? No, not really. But he still would have been a basic improvement on players like even Savea at the tail of his career, Bridge, and could even have converted into the answer of replacing Beauden at the back. Instead we persisted with NMS, Naholo, Havili, Reece, all players we would have cared even less about losing and all because Rieko had Lowe's number 11 jersey nailed down.


He was of course only 23 when he decided to leave, it was back in the beggining of the period they had started retaining players (from 2018 onwards I think, they came out saying theyre going to be more aggressive at some point). So he might, all of them, only just missed out.


The main point that Ed made is that situations like Lowe's, Aki's, JGP's, aren't going to happen in future. That's a bit of a "NZ" only problem, because those players need to reach such a high standard to be chosen by the All Blacks, were as a country like Ireland wants them a lot earlier like that. This is basically the 'ready in 3 years' concept Ireland relied on, versus the '5 years and they've left' concept' were that player is now ready to be chosen by the All Blacks (given a contract to play Super, ala SBW, and hopefully Manu).


The 'mercenary' thing that will take longer to expire, and which I was referring to, is the grandparents rule. The new kids coming through now aren't going to have as many gp born overseas, so the amount of players that can leave with a prospect of International rugby offer are going to drop dramatically at some point. All these kiwi fellas playing for a PI, is going to stop sadly.


The new era problem that will replace those old concerns is now French and Japanese clubs (doing the same as NRL teams have done for decades by) picking kids out of school. The problem here is not so much a national identity one, than it is a farm system where 9 in 10 players are left with nothing. A stunted education and no support in a foreign country (well they'll get kicked out of those countries were they don't in Australia).


It's the same sort of situation were NZ would be the big guy, but there weren't many downsides with it. The only one I can think was brought up but a poster on this site, I can't recall who it was, but he seemed to know a lot of kids coming from the Islands weren't really given the capability to fly back home during school xms holidays etc. That is probably something that should be fixed by the union. Otherwise getting someone like Fakatava over here for his last year of school definitely results in NZ being able to pick the cherries off the top but it also allows that player to develop and be able to represent Tonga and under age and possibly even later in his career. Where as a kid being taken from NZ is arguably going to be worse off in every respect other than perhaps money. Not going to develop as a person, not going to develop as a player as much, so I have a lotof sympathy for NZs case that I don't include them in that group but I certainly see where you're coming from and it encourages other countries to think they can do the same while not realising they're making a much worse experience/situation.

147 Go to comments
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