SARrugby.com

Ex Keo

Quade Cooper has signed a new two-year deal with the Australian Rugby Union worth A$750 000 (R6.8 million) a season.

The flyhalf looked set to leave Australian rugby after rejecting the ARU’s initial contract offer. He was said to be considering a lucrative offer with a French club, and also announced he would contest his first professional boxing bout in Brisbane on 8 February – eight days before the Reds kick off their Super Rugby campaign.

Cooper reiterated his passion for the Reds and the Wallabies jersey after signing the new deal, but he said he was still committed to his boxing debut.

‘It’s a very happy moment, to be able to continue my career with the Reds and hopefully the Wallabies is pretty exciting,’ he said. ‘Reds chairman Rod McCall, [director of coaching] Ewen [McKenzie] and [Reds CEO] Jim Carmichael have worked very hard with [ARU chairman] Michael Hawker behind the scenes and were able to get a deal done. Now I can concentrate on my footy career and my upcoming boxing fight.’

Cooper said it had never been a matter of him walking away from Australian rugby.

‘I expressed my desire to continue to play rugby but there was no contract at that stage so I had to continue on and deal with what I had. So last week I held a press conference to announce that fight to make sure I had something there.’

When asked if he would be happy to play under Wallabies coach Robbie Deans again, Cooper said: ‘Of course’

Seesm ou sbw and quade are about to get flattenedin the ring. Best stick to rugby boys!  Mind you their running skills coul dsave them!.

Hope Redsman is happy that Cooper is back.  On form he is a menace together with Genia.

Some interesting characters there are down under. Ex Keo

Football royalty put bucks before loyalty to crack the codes.’
He looks so good, that Sonny Quade-Folau. He is the ultimate first choice athlete. The man who has football administrators throwing $100 notes like confetti. The dynamic ball of muscle the Olympic sports can’t even dream of getting in a rowboat or on a badminton court. This guy does not play for gold medal bling and peanuts.

Sonny Quade-Folau is the X-factor. The man you think can push your club through the premiership window, or drag it from the floor. Who can attract TV eyeballs and convert those impressionable kids. A gun for hire in the battle of the codes.

But before you book the luxury yacht and prepare to wine and dine him, there are a few things you should know. Things that should be tattooed in capital letters on this ultimate Generation Y athlete, if there was room left. When you play with Sonny Quade-Folau, you play by his rules.

No disrespect to you or your game – rugby league, is it? But Sonny Quade-Folau is a man in demand. He may not be tied down by dated conventions such as multi-year contracts or – can you believe people still use this term? – club loyalty. He is here for a pay time, not for a long time.

Yes, Sonny Quade-Folau is eternally grateful your code has identified his talents and made him a lucrative offer – an eternity, for him, being the time between eating breakfast and tweeting that it was scrambled eggs on toast. But don’t spend too long working out the details. After all, in the month it takes you to balance the salary cap, Sonny Quade-Folau could have done lucrative guest stints in Japan and France and fought on the Anthony Mundine undercard.

But let’s say Sonny Quade-Folau agrees to join your rugby league. Don’t expect him to do handstands for the media, or to say he is eternally grateful to play this great game, or that he feels like he is coming home (”I have played this game before haven’t I? It’s the one where you get four points for a try and those people from Queensland keep nagging you to say you were born in Ipswich?”)

Sonny Quade-Folau will only do a press conference to announce his new deal if he can also promote his next fight and make it clear to his old paymasters at rugby union or the AFL or the International Marbles Association that – wink, wink – I’m not gone forever. Maybe only a one-year deal here. Don’t be strangers next September.

To be fair, Sonny Quade-Folau does not lead you down the garden path. It might be Christmas, but he makes it perfectly clear the only clause he may believe in is the get-out clause. The one that ensures his ”loyalty” is fully transportable. So don’t blame him after that big win when he sings the wrong song or fret that he calls everyone at the club ”mate”. Can’t expect him to remember a new bunch of teammates every season.

Which is not to say Sonny Quade-Folau will not abide by team rules. He even took the trouble to write them down for you. Preferred position, required personal training staff and, of course, the time off needed for those pay-per-view bouts. There are photocopies for the coaches and the team. Do you mind handing them out? Sonny Quade has a personal sponsorship commitment?

What’s that? You’ve seen him do three laps in sport’s revolving door, read his demands and you are still interested? You think taking over his multimillion-dollar contract will be a coup for club and code? That all those people who were supposed to have become baked-on supporters watching him play another game will now follow yours?

Don’t you see the absurdity in that logic? That the loyalty of the supporters who follow Sonny Quade-Folau from one sport to another is as disposable as his. That the humiliation these inter-code footballing freelancers may inflict upon your code, and your clubs, is greater than the exposure they bring?

Until you work that out, Sonny Quade-Folau will have you over a barrel

Hahahahahaha what a case this guy is.

More problems re Quade's return:

Roy Masters has the best sporting contacts in Sydney. Wayne Smith is a virtual spokesman of the Queensland Rugby Union. On Saturday both these well-informed journalists wrote about the case of Quade Cooper and its side-kick, the Israel Folau issue.

The main conclusion that can be drawn from the articles published in The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald is that Australian rugby has created a fine mess for itself.

Everyone involved seems to be leaking like sieves on these matters (tall about gossip girls!!!). Putting all the articles and leaks together we get a picture of a wilful, untrustworthy (in my view) and egocentric Cooper playing off the various parties involved with his rugby contract in a manner that insults the code he makes huge amounts of money playing for.

Let’s start at the end, as it were. Cooper’s contract with the Reds and the ARU ends on December 31.

It is the biggest of any current Wallaby mainly because when it was negotiated Cooper insisted that he be granted $1 more than Matt Giteau, who had been the highest paid Australian rugby player.

With a December 31 deadline in mind, the ARU back in April (note the date) put an extremely generous offer for 2013/2014 on the table to Cooper and his manager Khoder Nasser.

Cooper refused to sign the offer and during his infamous interview on The Rugby Club maintained that the offers to him were totally unacceptable. The April offer was actually over-generous given the fact that Cooper had played a very poor 2011 Rugby World Cup tournament.

Ironically, Robbie Deans was criticised by many people (including numbers of Roarers) for playing Cooper in the semi-final against New Zealand.

Cooper, too, was out injured, knee damage suffered during the 2011 Rugby World Cup third place play-off.

There was also the juvenile twittering throughout 2011, the stupidity of kneeing Richie McCaw in several Tests, boorish and trash behaviour with Kurtley Beale and James O’Connor, the self-styled ‘Three Amigos’ and the matter of police action involving two laptops.

Given all this, the ARU showed terrific good faith and, indeed, some compassion in making its generous offer to Cooper in April.

This good faith and compassion was met with a surly arrogance that reflects poorly on Cooper.

Instead of accepting the offer or negotiating in good faith on a few minor details, Nasser (presumably acting on Cooper’s instruction) start to make a series of unacceptable demands.

One of the demands was for an arrangement allowing Cooper to have boxing matches during his rugby season, a sort of small man’s Sonny Bill Williams option. A frustrated ARU told Cooper and his manager that he could have his boxing option when he learns to tackle. Gotcha! (HAHAHAHAAHAHAHA)

It was clear to everyone involved with the contract negotiations that there was little good faith involved in their deals with Cooper and Nasser.

Cooper himself talked about wanting to play rugby league with his mate Sonny Bill. This is hardly the sort of talk any code wants to hear from one of its highest paid star players.

When Cooper finally got back on the field, he played adequately for the Reds and poorly for the Wallabies. Again, Deans was criticised for restoring him and retaining him in the starting line-up.

The frustrating negotiations between the ARU and the Cooper/Nasser pair continued.

Cooper played poorly for the Wallabies and, apparently, was criticised by the Wallaby coaching staff.

Now injured Cooper began a campaign to unseat the coach who had first promoted him into the Wallabies, who had stuck with him during the 2011 Rugby World Cup tournament and who had restored him to the Wallabies this year despite lacklustre form after a long time out of rugby because of a leg injury.

During his infamous interview Cooper bizarrely called the gold Wallaby jersey ‘yellow’ and said that the atmosphere in the Wallabies was so ‘toxic’ he couldn’t see himself playing again for the team with its current management.

This totally unacceptable behaviour forced the ARU to withdraw his contract. Cooper was fined and then offered a greatly reduced contract which relied on incentive payments from playing for the Wallabies to enhance the $400,000 contract he’d already signed with the Reds.

Now here is the crucial information that has not been revealed. Senior Wallabies (including Queensland players) informed the ARU they didn’t want Cooper back in the Wallabies squad.

The push to get the ARU to upgrade Cooper’s contract came from the officials at the Queensland Reds. And why? The SMH reported at the time: ‘Cooper’s supporters within the game believe the situation would change dramatically if Wallabies coach Robbie Deans were sacked and replaced by Reds coach, Ewen McKenzie, with whom he has a good relationship.’

Rugby politics now comes in to provide a conclusion of sorts to the unedifying saga.

Earlier this year the ARU commissioned a report into a new governance structure for ARU which is needed for the organisation to receive government money to finance the Sevens Rugby men and women’s programs, particularly, in the run-up to the Rio Olympics in 2016.

The structure recommended ends the veto power of the NSW and Queensland unions.

Masters and Smith hinted at the truth about how the politics of the new governance structure was used by the Reds officials to force the ARU to come to heel to stop the Cooper barking.

The Reds told the ARU it would not sign the new governance proposal until the ARU signed up Cooper. The chairman of the ARU, Michael Hawker, dealt with Nasser in a one-on-one negotiation.

Cooper was given every thing he wanted, including a boxing match in early February, and about $800,000 from the ARU and Reds.

The outcome was a total capitulation by the ARU, and a repudiation of the advice from senior Wallabies and senior officials at the ARU.

We now get to the stories last Saturday by Masters and Smith.

Masters reported that Israel Folau not only signed a deal with the Waratahs. He also was given a secret $400,000 top-up from the ARU. It was this top-up making Folau a $650,000 plus rugby player, rather than any weakness in the NRL negotiations, that tipped the player into the Waratahs camp.

And how did the Waratahs get the ARU to front up with the extra massive amount of money? By refusing to sign up to the new governance structure unless the ARU delivered Folau to the franchise. Anything the Reds can do, it seems, the Waratahs can emulate.

An important point needs to be made here. In 2008, the ARU was paying a Wallaby top-up to over 50 Super Rugby players. In the years since then it has been the policy of the ARU’s board to cut back on these top-ups (the money isn’t available to service them in the future).

There has been steady progress to putting players on incentive payments based on the number of Tests they played.

But this progress has now been slowed down, if not entirely stopped. For immediately after the Cooper final deal, managers of prominent Wallabies were in contact with the ARU looking to Cooper-ise their clients’ contracts.

In The Australian, Wayne Smith suggested that there is a growing belief in the ARU that Michael Cheika, rather than Ewen McKenzie, should take over as the Wallaby coach if Deans is forced out. There are concerns, Smith reports, that the Cooper/McKenzie push is being seen as part of an attempted Queensland takeover of the ARU.

Finally, here is a par from Danny Weidler’s sports gossip column in Sunday’s Sun-Herald that gives the flavour of the delusional Cooper/Nasser world:

“Quade Cooper is taking his boxing debut more seriously than he’d like anyone to know. He has been training three times a day for his February 8 debut. He finally got the respect he was after from the ARU. His deal will be worth close to $1 million a year.

“If the promises that Cooper has been made come true, his detractors at the ARU should be looking over their shoulders. It all points to Robbie Deans being shown the door

Seems Quade is a bad boy too immature to handle star status. This veto power is crazy. Very suprised the smart Oz would have such a fatal flaw in their system.

H e has been poor since returning from injury and now has a lot to prove.