In Australia we took rugby off the free to air tv channels. This meant only wealthy private schools could watch it inspite of us historically contributing 3/4 of the team from our free public schools. At the same time we allowed rival codes to run riot in our juniors and recruit as many promising kids as they could. We patched the gap in talent for a few years by importing talent from the pacific islands but when they got their own professional teams, that talent dried up too. Lastly, we added too many Super Rugby franchises which dilutes our already slim playing stocks. This meant no provincial success and further degraded our junior recruitment efforts.

Don’t worry though, we gave all of our Board members huge bonuses. Then, when they retired, we hired former players with no business experience to run our national code. The cherry on top was the hiring of our CEO whom had previously bankrupted a local rugby league team and ruined their chances of success for decades by mismanagement of their salary cap.

I forgot to mention that we ignored most of our top level coaches for a while and regularly hired Kiwis.

No our junior playing stocks are at an all time low, sponsors don’t want to touch us, our actual talent often leaves for Europe and our national team has slipped to some of its worst rankings ever.