Rugby League Coaching Manuals

By Roy Masters, Mandurah Mail - Bush football is a tree with flourishing roots but suffering dieback at its crown if rugby league in the Riverina is any indication. Junior league is strong but the code is dying at the top as drought, recession, lopsided leagues and the reluctance of former NRL players to end their careers as country captain-coaches affect the number and quality of senior teams.

This was the message delivered to NRL chief executive David Gallop as he faced one of league administration's most strident critics, former international Les Boyd, in the bar of the Royal Hotel in Harden this week.

Boyd is accustomed to confronting officialdom head-on. Suspended from Group 9 for eight weeks for abusing a referee, Boyd is your quintessential "bush lawyer". He laces his language with terms such as the "denial of the right to address on penalty", while Gallop, a lawyer, nods knowingly.

"I made one mistake," he says of his castigation of a referee, following a finals match last year in which his home town, Cootamundra, was beaten via a lopsided penalty count. His language was temperate but, as he admits: "I made a half step into the open door of the referees' room."

Insofar as the 52-year-old has legs like tree trunks and fills a door frame, it would have been a fearsome sight. "When the judiciary told me I had been suspended for eight weeks, I said, 'If you want to punish me, give me 20 games."'

Boyd is a representative for Tooheys, which sponsors country rugby league, meaning he visits bush pubs and is the full bottle on what ails the game. Two years ago, he met Gallop in the bar of the Cootamundra Bulldogs clubhouse.

What has changed?

"Not one bloody thing," Boyd says, eyeing Gallop with a look that frightened the froth off my beer.

Gallop, whose NRL funds the Country Rugby League but doesn't administer it, said somewhat bravely: "An additional $2 million has been spent in the bush over those two years."

There are 35 development officers and seven regional managers employed by the CRL, whereas when Boyd returned to Cootamundra after playing in England in the late 1980s there were three full-time employees in the bush.

"Junior rugby league is very strong and very well run," Boyd admits, and this was evident in the knowledgeable questions asked of Canberra players Joel Monaghan and Terry Campese and the Dragons' Brett Morris by schoolchildren, as Gallop swept through towns such as Wombat, Binalong and Harden during this year's Country Carnival, part of a visit by 107 players to 206 schools in 52 communities.

Boyd's litany of problems in the senior ranks included:

� Insurance and registration costs of $187 per player, plus a month's gap before a claim is lodged and $300 maximum payment a week, which means Cootamundra's two best players - tradesmen with young families - won't play this season.

� Wealthy clubs, funded by a benefactor, buy the best talent. "Tumut is big in timber and they've won a couple of comps. Wagga Kangaroos are also bankrolled. They just bought the CRL player of the year, a bloody giant [prop Grant Wooden] from Brothers. Clubs are paying out $250,000 to win $10,000 [grand final prize]."

� The cost of fuel and outdated boundaries: "Albury travel long distances every second week, and the bus has to leave early in time for the kids to play."

� Parkes hosted an NRL game and kept the upside, allowing them to buy three Cootamundra players.

� Only two former NRL players (Wagga Brothers' Craig Field and Junee's Adam Perry) are playing in Group 9, whereas Boyd says, "There would have been 14 to 15 ex-Sydney first-graders when I played for Cootamundra after coming back from the Australian schoolboys tour in 1973."

Unlike most of the game's critics, Boyd has solutions: a points system to equalise talent; redrawn boundaries; each region allocated an NRL trial match and the profit shared equally; free State of Origin tickets for volunteers, particularly Polynesian families, who are reluctant to be involved.

CRL chief executive, Terry Quinn, when asked to respond, said simply: "I agree with Les. We've put in point systems at other groups, and it will happen in the Riverina. Our Back to the Bush program encourages the community to welcome back those kids who don't quite make it."

Of the 50,431 registered players aged five to seniors in the CRL, 10,582 are seniors, up 416 on last year. This defies national trends in other sports, and even the CRL admits its increased numbers of seniors has reversed a historic decline.

Quinn concedes his organisation must remain innovative, like the publican of Harden's Royal Hotel, who has bought 800 pounds of jelly from Melbourne for a jelly-wrestling competition on Valentine's Day with prizemoney of $100 in each of three categories - male, female and mixed.

Even Quinn admits there was some nervousness by Group 9 officials in suspending Boyd. "They did wait until after the grand final before doing it," Quinn conceded, while revealing there is something far more crucial to the future of the bush than the need for officials to pacify a man who would scare a dog off a bone. Money.

"The fact Tooheys sponsors the group might have had something to do with it," Quinn concedes.