Anti-Football — Joke or Paradox

People who worked with Cowan, or dealt with him through rugby league administration over the years, saw the anti-rugby league tag very differently.

Greg Mitchell, rugby league general manager at Parramatta,¹ was a contemporary of Cowan during the NSWRL days. They attended many meetings together.

If there was some issue facing the game at the time, Roger always had a paper to present to provide a new perspective. He was certainly always current and relevant in terms of rugby league issues.

David Gallop says the fact that Cowan was on the Board of Super League is evidence of his reputation as a leader among football club CEOs.

I’ve always found him to be a deep thinker about rugby league and how to improve the game. For instance, his role in the judiciary concept and the amount of written material that he put together in relation to that – shows that he was very interested in the future of rugby league.

Roger Cowan was the original architect of the judiciary system introduced by Super League in 1997 and subsequently adopted by the NRL. In a 2003 paper, academics Ian Dobinson and David Thorpe described the system as a “benchmark or exemplar for how sports … should deal with on-field violence”.

Cowan says the way the rugby league judiciary worked had long been a problem in his mind.

Even back in the early seventies, when I was on the NSWRL executive committee, there was always controversy about the way the judiciary worked. Often there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the decisions, and some teams appeared to be getting more favourable treatment than others. One night I decided to suggest an improvement to the system.

Bill Buckley was the chairman at the time. I waited till general business, then stood up and said,

“I want to make a suggestion about the judiciary system”.

Buckley said,

“Sit down, Mr Cowan, you’re not here to talk about judiciary”.

“But I just want to suggest an improvement.”

“Sit down, Mr Cowan or leave the meeting. You are out of order”.

That was it. He was going to throw me out of the meeting rather than listen to a suggestion. The culture of rugby league was always pretty closed in its early days. There was that inner circle, and they were fixed in their ways. It was very much a closed environment for ideas. It was an “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” kind of atmosphere. “We’ve been doing it this way since nineteen hundred and nothing …”.’ It took around twenty years for it to change.

At a Super League meeting one night, we started talking about judiciary, and I said, “I’ve always had a passion for judiciary, I’d like to write a paper on it.” They said, “Terrific! Go ahead, do it”. It was such an open and participative environment. Everyone worked together in a great spirit of cooperation to get things done.

I wrote a proposal, and we worked on it as a team. There were a number of modifications, and it came into operation in time for the commencement of the Super League competition. When the NRL competition started there was great debate about which system to use for judiciary – the Super League or the ARL system. They agreed to use the Super League system, but to my horror and frustration they started to use it incorrectly. It was going back to being more like the ARL system. Fortunately, someone must have seen what a mess they were making of it and made the necessary changes.

Cowan says his original system was refined by the input of others on the Super League planning group, and since then there have been some minor modifications but the basic principles remain the same. Thorpe and Dobinson agree that the previous NSWRL judiciary procedure was viewed as arbitrary and inconsistent. Their research also found that it ‘was not written down anywhere and varied from chairman to chairman’.

The NRL system was also adopted by the Australian Football League at the beginning of the 2005 season. In an article in a sports law journal, The Commentator, Andrew Stops, a partner in Piper Alderman’s Dispute Resolution Group, Melbourne, made the following comment:

 The tribunal system is a great credit to the AFL. It is transparent, predictable and flexible enough to deal with a wide variety of incidents that can and do occur in our national game.

Beyond the Book: Roger’s original judiciary papers survive, providing an unusual opportunity to follow the way he approached the problem — from defining the desired outcomes to designing the system and later defending its principles. Read: Don’t Fix the Decision. Fix the System.

At the time he was interviewed for the book, David Costello was CEO of ClubsNSW, having previously held the same role with the Leagues Club Association. He had a long association with Roger Cowan. He laughs at the suggestion that Cowan was “not a rugby league man”.

I don’t believe that myth. Roger is an absolute supporter of rugby league, I’ve seen it personally, in the support that he extends to junior rugby league and so many other areas.

I think more than anything else, he’s encouraged better professionalism on the football club side of things – as opposed to the leagues clubs side. I don’t believe that Roger ever had anything but absolute regard for rugby league, and the need to promote it and propagate it. But he was also very mindful of the costs associated with supporting a professional rugby league team. He would have liked the football club to be able to fully fund rugby league at some stage, given the pressures that we’re now seeing with government taxation levels.

So, to suggest that he’s not passionate about it – that’s a joke.

Roy Masters says Roger Cowan’s ‘anti-rugby league’ tag is paradoxical.

There were many times that he had to pull himself away from rugby league, because people were saying he was too hands-on. He played rugby league. He’s always been fascinated by the game and quite a few times he was involved at the administration level.

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1. Greg Mitchell left Parramatta Eels in 2005 and joined the NSW Rugby League Western Academy. ↩︎

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