Why Raelene Castle was never the right person to lead Australian rugby

This past week will be one remembered in the history Australian rugby as one of its most bruising, yet not a ball has been kicked, a whistle blown or a hand shaken.

In fact, the Australian sporting public witnessed the once silent, and some never silent, protagonists in Australian rugby’s ‘Cold War’ put more than shots across each other’s bows.

Shots were fired, shots were landed and the former CEO of Rugby Australia Raelene Castle has gone down with her ship.

What was at stake? The prize each faction sought is not to plunder the practically empty treasure chest of Australian rugby but the power to reform and refill it.

So, why could Castle no longer be part of that struggle? Why did she no longer enjoy the support of her faction?

It is because at the time she became employed Rugby Australia in 2017, her days were already numbered as she had inherited a code that had multiple issues of significant proportion – none of which were of her own doing.

In saying that, she was never the right person for the job given the task that lay ahead.

Before the overly or even mildly woke spit out their herbal tea or avocado on toast in protest, thinking this is an attack on Castle because she is a woman, button-up hippie, it is not.

You see, this week has been a long time coming for the game of rugby in Australia, and sadly for Castle she just happened to be carrying the can when these days of reckoning occurred.

Did she contribute to her own demise? I believe she did.

However, as interim Rugby Australia chairman Paul McLean suggested during the week, ‘dark forces’ have been at work.

It’s unclear what Paul means, but how rugby has been collectively administered in this country since the game went professional at the end of 1995 also has its part to play.

When the guns lay silent at the end of the 1995 rugby wars, peace was declared, and News Limited paid the New Zealand, South African and Australia rugby unions $550 million for the right to broadcast provincial and test rugby for 15 years.

SANZAR was born and along with it came the Tri-Nations and Super 12 competitions that it would administer.

It was party time in downtown ‘Rugbyville’ and it was good. For a period of time.

Move forward 15 years to 2011 and Australian rugby was hardly in rude health, but it was holding its own.

The glory years of 1998-2002 were a speck in the rear vision mirror in the limousine travelling along a road to that would eventually intersect with Castle on April 23, 2020.