Andrew Hore is at real risk of becoming the most effective Waratahs chief executive in recent history.
He is taking three Super Rugby regular season games to western Sydney next year and there's a better-than-even chance there will be more in 2020 and 2021, while the Allianz Stadium rebuild continues.
Western world: Waratahs CEO Andrew Hore is delivering on a promise to take the Super Rugby side to the west.Credit:Louie Douvis
Hore largely inherited the circumstance – because the Allianz knockdown is a NSW Government project that was backed by his predecessors at NSW Rugby and Rugby Australia – but he didn't have to choose Parramatta.
The Waratahs could have played more games at the SCG, taken a couple to Brookvale Oval and sent one to Newcastle to pay lip service to regional NSW. Nice and safe.
But Hore saw an opportunity to turn lemons – the disruption and uncertainty of the next three seasons – into lemonade, piggybacking a modest, but potentially effective, "Western Sydney Action Plan" on to the big-splash gesture of three Super Rugby games in western Sydney.
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It's radical stuff. As a plucky reporter put to Hore at the announcement overlooking the Parramatta River and half-built Western Sydney Stadium on Thursday: "This is league heartland, why would you bother?"
Huge population growth, for one thing; changing demographics for another.
Hore saw two things happening: people moving to the city's north-west from the rugby-loving northern beaches and upper north shore in search of cheaper housing; and ever-expanding pockets of Pacific Islands immigrants, for whom rugby is their first sport.
Star power: Israel Folau and the Waratahs are heading west next season.Credit:AAP
He also knew, because so many people pointed it out to him, that you can talk all you like about loving western Sydney; you can throw on a few clinics and send out your foot soldier development officers and tell people rugby's a great sport; but if your team never gets out of its eastern enclave for an actual game, it doesn't mean anything.
It doesn't even mean nothing. It means, despite what you're saying and the little things you're doing, actually, you don't care at all.
Hore had to fight to get it done. Allianz Stadium's custodians, the SCG Trust, held out for as long as they could to their contract with NSW Rugby, which stipulated that if an alternate ground was available (the big one right next door), the Waratahs had to play there.
In the end it came down to an AFL draw months in the making and a clause in the contract, which says that if the SCG Trust cannot provide clarity on dates in a timely manner (because they were waiting on the Swans' fixtures) and someone else could, the Waratahs were free to take up the other offer.
So they did.
Go west, young men: Parramatta's Ken Catchpole Medalist Adrian Musico, Waratahs prop Shambeckler Vui, centre Curtis Rona, NSW Rugby Union boss Andrew Hore, NSW Minister for Sport Stuart Ayres and Waratahs coach Daryl Gibson with Waratahs supporters Lincoln, 11, and Hayden Milson, 8.
Having asked members, players, fans and corporates what they wanted for next season, the fixtures will be split between the SCG (three), Western Sydney Stadium (three), one suburban ground and one regional destination.
Since he arrived two years ago, Hore has been at pains to say the Waratahs "are not a club team, we're a state team". Little by little, there are nuggets of truth behind the spin.
It is a gamble, nevertheless. The Sharks and Jaguares are not quite the blockbuster fixtures you'd hope to take out west and the Brumbies game, a good choice considering the geography, is on the June long weekend. But the SCG Trust had some say in which games went and which stayed. Unsurprisingly, they are understood to have kept the Reds, Crusaders and Hurricanes fixtures for themselves.
Working in the Waratahs' favour will be the shiny new stadium itself, with its vertiginous stands and table-top playing surface, plus a major train station an easy walk away. And stellar "food and bev", as Hore put it.
New home: The new Western Sydney Stadium, where the Waratahs will play three games in 2019.
The curiosity factor will certainly help lure the eastern suburbs and north shore types. The SCG Trust is even going to put on buses to truck its members up Parramatta Road on game day.
Radical stuff, as I said.
Even more radical? The possibilities created by the confluence of outrageous fortune and sensible strategy. Couple a meaningful professional rugby presence in western Sydney with combined schools and club competitions for under-15s to under-18s, a Shute Shield under-18s competition, which will all start next year, and the fostering of the already well-subscribed Pasifika Cup, and who knows?
NSW Rugby might be in danger of really doing something out west.
Georgina Robinson is a Sports Reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald
