Fresh from outraging Twitter wokescolds and spooking gutless advertisers by verbally bashing New Zealand’s Part-Time PM, Alan Jones is taking the rhetorical cudgels to another bunch of Kiwis. Well, to be fair, he’s not bashing the second-rate Kiwis infesting Australian rugby, but rather the Australian administrators who keep promoting people who are too useless to find a job back home.
I must begin this week where I ended last week, in a state of disbelief. I mentioned then, hoping I was wrong, that the Kiwi CEO running NSW Rugby was going to replace the existing Kiwi Waratahs coach with another Kiwi.
Let’s be blunt, the NSW CEO, Andrew Hore, is a very average Kiwi administrator.
These people are not working in New Zealand because they are not good enough.
The same disease long plagued Australian enterprises from entertainment, to science, and to sport. The “cultural cringe” once meant that third-rate American and British artists were being sobered up and roped in to head Australian cultural enterprises. When basketball began to take off in Australia, teams were padded with lacklustre Americans who weren’t good enough for the big bucks at the NBA. Now, Jones says, the same is happening to rugby.
Yet now, it’s widely accepted that a Kiwi, Rob Penney, will coach the Waratahs and Dave Rennie, another Kiwi, will coach the Wallabies in 2020.
They most probably can’t believe their luck.
Penney is an average Kiwi coach who can’t get a job in New Zealand. I suppose being a Kiwi coach is not the end of the world, but they are not world-class.
Do we interview these people? Who does the interviewing, if there is any?
In the same way that lazy employers are relying on the cheap sugar hit of flooding the place with 457 Visa workers rather than investing in Australian workers, rugby administrators are labouring under the delusion that any old foreign also-ran is a good investment.
We certainly don’t interview people like David Campese, the Bradman of rugby, yet now we look like being lumped with this…Who interviewed these people and against what criteria were they evaluated?
[…]Rob Penney has no business coaching the Waratahs. He is an average Kiwi coach replacing an average Kiwi coach in Daryl Gibson. This is madness.
Because Australian rugby is being run by the sort of people who run their business based on the vicious whims of Twitter bullies and virtue-signalling sponsors, rather than the actual game.
It seems that, as with everything else rugby, those running the game are impervious to a dose of Australian common sense. And that has happened with the selection of the Wallabies squad for the World Cup.
In the team that has been chosen, 12 of the players weren’t born in Australia. I don’t have a problem with that but it makes me wonder whether we have a comprehensive strategy to develop local talent; or, as with selecting coaches, does the grass seem greener on the other side?
[…]Obviously, in the mindset of Rugby Australia, it is clear that Israel Folau is not worth as much to Rugby Australia as Qantas. And after coaching appointments, team selections and the spending of money, isn’t this the ultimate proof that the game we used to know is being stood on its head?
theaustralian.com.au/sport/rugby-union/why-are-we-giving-jobs-to-secondrate-kiwis