Australian rugby is licking its wounds after a miserable year that drew the curtains on a decade best consigned to the sport’s historic dustbin.
Rugby enters a new 10-year block facing serious challenges to its status as a premier Australian sporting product, the Israel Folau storm of 2019 the latest and most damaging from a collection of off-field blow-ups.
Negative headlines have outnumbered celebratory moments, the last of which came three years ago when the women’s sevens team collected gold at the Rio Olympics.
Men’s results have tailed off although the Wallabies sparked memories of the glorious 1990s when the 2015 side under Michael Cheika defied all predictions and reached the Rugby World Cup final.
Cheika was at the helm when the NSW Waratahs won a maiden Super Rugby crown a year earlier, mirroring the deeds of the 2011 Queensland Reds.
Otherwise, Super Rugby was a grim landscape for Australian sides, translating into a struggling Wallabies team whose form was rarely better than patchy. A winning ratio of just over 50 per cent across the decade was the sixth best among tier-one nations.
Reclaiming the Bledisloe Cup was a task too hard for Robbie Deans, Ewen McKenzie and Cheika, whose Wallabies coaching tenures all ended on low notes.
Turnover king David Pocock was a world-class forward operator but a dearth of x-factor backline players made the sport a hard sell.
Aside from Folau, it’s hard to think of an attacking back that repeatedly got hearts racing, although Will Genia and Quade Cooper were a lethal playmaking pair for a fleeting time.
Cooper became as well known for his off-field run-ins, a member of the “three amigos” – alongside Kurtley Beale and James O’Connor – the young Test stars who kept officialdom on their toes.