Mark
18-12-04, 04:47 AM
According to a recent estimate, as many as 70,000 people in Perth - roughly one in 20 inhabitants - are migrants or the families of migrants from South Africa, and nearly all of them would probably choose rugby union as their No.1 football code.
Perth also has an abundance of expats from rugby states in the east; a big community of New Zealanders; a solid British-born population, many of whom have some level of interest in the game; and a core of home-grown rugby players and followers.
It is a ready-made audience that rugby league would dearly like to have had when it established the Western Reds in Perth a decade ago. The league team folded after three years. Now, rugby is about to position a Super 14 team in the same city. Can it succeed where league failed?
For the time being, local opinion is positive, perhaps reflecting the Perth media's generally favourable coverage of the Super 14 venture. Rugby has a good image in Perth. One of last year's World Cup matches drew a sell-out crowd of 42,000 people at Subiaco Oval. Admittedly, many would have been expats and visitors but it was still an impressive turnout in an AFL city.
Yet the fact remains that, in Perth, rugby is a minority sport. While it is certainly growing at the junior level (since 1997 junior player numbers in Western Australia have more than doubled to 2500), the game is still played at only 30 schools in the whole of the state, 21 private and nine government. It happens, though, that these include the state's most exclusive schools.
This helps to explain why the game has a strong following within Perth's professional elite. The state's Chief Justice, David Malcolm, is a rugby diehard, for instance. The business connection is also strong. By all accounts, there is a rugby network within the boardrooms of Western Australia's top companies into which large numbers of directors and senior executives tap.
According to one of Perth's leading businessmen, Tony Howarth, a former Challenge Bank managing director who sits on many company boards, the nature of the city has a lot to do with this.
"You've got to understand the population of Perth," he said. "Around 60 per cent of people here weren't born here or their parents weren't. It's a city that's grown with enormous speed over the past couple of decades.
"At the top end of town, particularly, it's a place where people have come to and then decided to stay. It has a strong professional South African population, a strong professional eastern-states population. A lot of these people hold down very senior jobs, whether they be lawyers, accountants or whatever, and a lot are passionate rugby followers."
Rugby's socio-economic profile is no doubt viewed as a plus by prospective sponsors of the new Super 14 team. In the opinion of Glenn Mitchell, head of ABC Sport in Western Australia, rugby will find sponsorship easier to come by in Perth than in Melbourne, which has 10 AFL teams compared with Perth's two, and which stages many more high-profile sports events that soak up sponsorship money. In Perth, the competition for sponsorship money will be less intense.
Then there is rugby's social status. "A lot of monied people here have a passion for rugby," Mitchell said. "There's quite a few West Australians who made rugby their sporting passion going through school and university and then continued to play club rugby afterwards.
"It's a very different sport here, socio-economically. If you compared rugby clubs with the average WAFL clubs, that's the level below the AFL, you'd find a very different social and economic make-up. A bigger percentage of the rugby players would be from white-collar, legal, professional backgrounds."
The only factor clouding rugby's prospects in Perth, Mitchell believes, is the absence of free-to-air television coverage. "It's going to present a problem attracting non-rugby followers. With every new sport there's enormous hype. When rugby league started here, they played to solid crowds early on. But the rugby league bubble burst very quickly.
"The problem with the Super 14 rugby is that people aren't going to be able to sit at home and watch it unless they have pay-TV. That may have a very big effect on how far it penetrates the general sporting culture in WA. Rugby will have to rely very heavily on people who are already enamoured with the sport, who have played it and understand it."
Mitchell points to the experience of the soccer team Perth Glory, which once drew crowds of 17,000 but whose attendances slipped to 12,000 when the game was no longer on free-to-air TV. Similarly, the Perth Wildcats were on a high when basketball was shown live on Friday night but their popularity tailed off as television exposure declined.
Even so, Mitchell thinks rugby has so much going for it in Perth that the Super 14 team has a good chance of surviving and prospering. The fact rugby's season begins so early would be an advantage, he said.
"They'll probably play three home games before our AFL teams start. Curious sports followers may well spend their money during those three weeks going down and watching this new team play.
"Another advantage is the very short season . . . With the Super 14, the fact you'll only have a chance to watch it live seven times a year will, I think, keep the crowds healthy. I'd be surprised if they don't start the first season averaging around 16,000 people."
What of local attitudes? How will the Super 14 team be received by Perth people generally? The local view is that the team will not encounter the kind of in-built opposition it might have encountered in Melbourne, which has a reputation for resisting anything it perceives to be of Sydney origin.
According to Dr Ed Jaggard, a Perth academic and author with a special interest in sport, Perth people are open-minded where sport is concerned. They watch what pleases them - interstate animosity just isn't an issue. "If Perth has any such feeling," he said, "it isn't against rugby. It's against Victorian AFL teams."
http://www.rugbyheaven.smh.com.au/articles/2004/12/17/1102787280258.html
Perth also has an abundance of expats from rugby states in the east; a big community of New Zealanders; a solid British-born population, many of whom have some level of interest in the game; and a core of home-grown rugby players and followers.
It is a ready-made audience that rugby league would dearly like to have had when it established the Western Reds in Perth a decade ago. The league team folded after three years. Now, rugby is about to position a Super 14 team in the same city. Can it succeed where league failed?
For the time being, local opinion is positive, perhaps reflecting the Perth media's generally favourable coverage of the Super 14 venture. Rugby has a good image in Perth. One of last year's World Cup matches drew a sell-out crowd of 42,000 people at Subiaco Oval. Admittedly, many would have been expats and visitors but it was still an impressive turnout in an AFL city.
Yet the fact remains that, in Perth, rugby is a minority sport. While it is certainly growing at the junior level (since 1997 junior player numbers in Western Australia have more than doubled to 2500), the game is still played at only 30 schools in the whole of the state, 21 private and nine government. It happens, though, that these include the state's most exclusive schools.
This helps to explain why the game has a strong following within Perth's professional elite. The state's Chief Justice, David Malcolm, is a rugby diehard, for instance. The business connection is also strong. By all accounts, there is a rugby network within the boardrooms of Western Australia's top companies into which large numbers of directors and senior executives tap.
According to one of Perth's leading businessmen, Tony Howarth, a former Challenge Bank managing director who sits on many company boards, the nature of the city has a lot to do with this.
"You've got to understand the population of Perth," he said. "Around 60 per cent of people here weren't born here or their parents weren't. It's a city that's grown with enormous speed over the past couple of decades.
"At the top end of town, particularly, it's a place where people have come to and then decided to stay. It has a strong professional South African population, a strong professional eastern-states population. A lot of these people hold down very senior jobs, whether they be lawyers, accountants or whatever, and a lot are passionate rugby followers."
Rugby's socio-economic profile is no doubt viewed as a plus by prospective sponsors of the new Super 14 team. In the opinion of Glenn Mitchell, head of ABC Sport in Western Australia, rugby will find sponsorship easier to come by in Perth than in Melbourne, which has 10 AFL teams compared with Perth's two, and which stages many more high-profile sports events that soak up sponsorship money. In Perth, the competition for sponsorship money will be less intense.
Then there is rugby's social status. "A lot of monied people here have a passion for rugby," Mitchell said. "There's quite a few West Australians who made rugby their sporting passion going through school and university and then continued to play club rugby afterwards.
"It's a very different sport here, socio-economically. If you compared rugby clubs with the average WAFL clubs, that's the level below the AFL, you'd find a very different social and economic make-up. A bigger percentage of the rugby players would be from white-collar, legal, professional backgrounds."
The only factor clouding rugby's prospects in Perth, Mitchell believes, is the absence of free-to-air television coverage. "It's going to present a problem attracting non-rugby followers. With every new sport there's enormous hype. When rugby league started here, they played to solid crowds early on. But the rugby league bubble burst very quickly.
"The problem with the Super 14 rugby is that people aren't going to be able to sit at home and watch it unless they have pay-TV. That may have a very big effect on how far it penetrates the general sporting culture in WA. Rugby will have to rely very heavily on people who are already enamoured with the sport, who have played it and understand it."
Mitchell points to the experience of the soccer team Perth Glory, which once drew crowds of 17,000 but whose attendances slipped to 12,000 when the game was no longer on free-to-air TV. Similarly, the Perth Wildcats were on a high when basketball was shown live on Friday night but their popularity tailed off as television exposure declined.
Even so, Mitchell thinks rugby has so much going for it in Perth that the Super 14 team has a good chance of surviving and prospering. The fact rugby's season begins so early would be an advantage, he said.
"They'll probably play three home games before our AFL teams start. Curious sports followers may well spend their money during those three weeks going down and watching this new team play.
"Another advantage is the very short season . . . With the Super 14, the fact you'll only have a chance to watch it live seven times a year will, I think, keep the crowds healthy. I'd be surprised if they don't start the first season averaging around 16,000 people."
What of local attitudes? How will the Super 14 team be received by Perth people generally? The local view is that the team will not encounter the kind of in-built opposition it might have encountered in Melbourne, which has a reputation for resisting anything it perceives to be of Sydney origin.
According to Dr Ed Jaggard, a Perth academic and author with a special interest in sport, Perth people are open-minded where sport is concerned. They watch what pleases them - interstate animosity just isn't an issue. "If Perth has any such feeling," he said, "it isn't against rugby. It's against Victorian AFL teams."
http://www.rugbyheaven.smh.com.au/articles/2004/12/17/1102787280258.html