By Nick Mulvenney
SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australian Brett Robinson, who was elected chairman of World Rugby on Thursday, stood on a platform of expansion and change for the game as it approaches the start of its fourth decade as a professional sport.
The 54-year-old former test flanker and surgeon turned businessman and sports administrator is the first permanent chairman of the global governing body from outside Europe.
Although southern hemisphere nations have won nine of the 10 men’s Rugby World Cups, the four previous elected holders of the office were from the wealthier and generally more conservative northern unions.
Robinson, who was on the Rugby Australia board for nine years and has served a similar spell on World Rugby’s executive board, stood as the candidate of innovation and was a strong advocate of the law changes that were passed on Thursday.
He takes over a game that continues to flourish in its heartlands at test level with the Nations Championship set to further build on that success when it finally gets off the ground in 2026.
The protracted birth of the global championship is, however, illustrative of a sport often hidebound by voting blocs and self interest where change can be glacially slow.
“I’m quite humbled to be asked to … step into the chair, but I’m impatient,” Robinson told “The Good, The Bad and The Rugby” podcast last week.
“But you’ve got to try and work within to drive change. So it’s about working out how you agitate, but coalesce and shift everyone together.”
MANY CHALLENGES
The women’s game is also growing apace but there are many challenges in Robinson’s in-tray such as how to bring on tier two nations and, perhaps most importantly, how to keep rugby safe for players while maintaining its essential physicality.
Having watched Rugby Australia lurch from one financial crisis to another over the last few years, Robinson is also acutely aware of the dangers of the game living beyond its means, particularly when it comes to player salaries.
“There is a really massive issue and that’s dealing with the creaking of our unions,” he added on the podcast.
“It’s the cost of our players that is really putting pressure on our cost bases. I think we’ve got to get real serious about that.”
While his predecessor Bill Beaumont was already widely known as a former England captain and team leader on a popular British TV sports quiz show, Robinson has a much lower profile.
A fine openside, he would probably have earned more than 16 Wallabies caps were it not for his medical studies in Brisbane and then at Oxford, where he captained the Dark Blues to victory over Cambridge in the 2001 Varsity Match.
During the early years of professional rugby, he was one of the first recruits to the inuagural ACT Brumbies Super Rugby squad and played in all 12 of Australia’s internationals in 1997.
After retiring from the game, Robinson moved on from medicine to the insurance industry and is currently the chief executive of Australia’s largest private owner of retirement villages.
Robinson could also have a familial interest in the success of the game in the coming years as his flanker son Tom last month captained the Australia schoolboys to their first victory over New Zealand in five years.
(Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, editing by Ken Ferris)
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