Australian Rugby Union Chair Cameron Clyne has "welcomed a summit meeting with the luminaries of the game, insisting that he and other members of the ARU board never claimed to have all the answers," according to Wayne Smith of THE AUSTRALIAN. Two former Australian coaches, Bob Dwyer and Alan Jones, and dozens of former Wallabies "have written a letter to the ARU board calling for a summit meeting to thrash out why the game is losing both support and participants." The group specifically wants the ARU to "explain why the grassroots of the game is being neglected, but so many and varied are rugby’s problems in Australia that any summit surely would need to be all-encompassing." Clyne, the former head of the National Australia Bank, said that "he would clear his diary to participate in the summit," as ARU CEO Bill Pulver already has promised to do. Clyne said, "If someone’s got practical solutions we’d love to hear them but unfortunately a lot of what has been suggested in the past has been completely impractical." Dwyer said that he "feared for the future survival of rugby" in Australia. But Dwyer said that he and other signatories to the letter "agreed with many of the strategies the ARU had set forth to grow the game." He said, "Some of those strategies we’re very supportive of -- sevens rugby, Viva sevens, women’s rugby. But what we are very much against is the centralized control" (THE AUSTRALIAN, 10/20). In Sydney, Tom Decent reported former Wallabies player Simon Poidevin has instructed Pulver to take the letter seriously or run the risk of a standoff that will "end in tears." Pulver said that he "felt there was more noise at this stage than genuine ideas of how to improve the state of the code." He said, "Apart from misquoting a A$2.4 million ($1.8M) investment in the community game -- when it's actually A$9.2 million ($7.1M) -- there's nothing else tangible in that document that specifically tells me what variable to our current strategy they would like to see. So I would like to have a conversation about where the game should go." When told Pulver "did not see a whole lot of ideas being put forward in the letter," Poidevin said, "I'd really challenge that. I don't think Bill's getting it. There's going to be a lot of signatures on that letter. Bill and the board have to take note. If you don't respect the experience and the hard yards put in by those Wallabies and the Wallaby coaches and you want to hide an ivory tower, it's going to end in tears. I wouldn't be trying to bat it away" (SMH, 10/19).
