.Peter_Fitz: This reset might be just the thing to make rugby great again
The first burst of professional rugby in Australia, basically until just a bit after the Eales era was over, went better than anyone could have imagined: the Wallabies started winning Bledisloes; lifted the 1999 World Cup; beat the British and Irish Lions; and crowds swelled as never before. The Waratahs regularly played before crowds of 40,000 at the Sydney Football Stadium and everyone in the wider rugby community felt a deep connection to their representative teams.I know it, and you know it.
Ambassadors for the game? Not really. Raelene Castle had to threaten her own holy hell to get some of the 2019 Wallabies to turn up for a function at the Australian embassy in Tokyo during that year’s World Cup.
The coronavirus pause, however, is going to allow a massive reset of the game in this country. It's a time to recognise what has gone wrong and how we can come together as rugby people of good will to fix it, make it better. While it is one thing for you to make a good living from it, if you don’t have a sense of privilege in wearing the jersey, you needn’t bother putting the boots on in the first place, and good luck in rugby league, or France, or wherever.In the new age to come, we must build slowly. Cutting back players' salaries to rather more humble levels will be easy – the new cake to split up is going to be a lot smaller anyway.
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