ANOTHER day, another disappointment for the National Rugby League.
Dave Smith’s decision (or it could have been one of his consultants) to launch the season in New Zealand in January has senior club figures privately fuming about the timing and tone of the event.
Instead of using superstars Johnathan Thurston and Greg Inglis as the stars of the show, Smith himself performed the job. Already under fire for launching his season in New Zealand, Smith added insult to injury by using the Nines as his launch pad in a cluttered schedule of summer sport in Australia.
Smith is being advised by a huge consultancy called Crosby Textor, which is headed up by Mark Textor, one of the blokes who has been handing Tony Abbott brilliant advice in recent months. Textor is a kingmaker who charges a king’s ransom. The NRL has been paying the firm for, in their words, “help with research from time to time”. Focus groups, research, surveys. Alarm bells are ringing loud with the mere mention of those words.
No other professional sport in the world has a season that lasts ten months and no winter code in Australia has ever launched its season in the middle of the Australian Open tennis, the One Day series and the Asian Cup final week.
Club bosses are wondering when anyone at the NRL or at the Commission going to start querying the cost of stables of consultants, executives and extremely expensive events like the one in Auckland for 500 people? One wondered out loud: “Why can’t we launch our season at the start of the real season?”
The game is the star. The players are the stars. One would venture a big opportunity has been lost this week in New Zealand.
