FRENCH NOTES:There's a disconnect between the people and teams in Australia and the problems all begin in Sydney, writes MATT WILLIAMS

AS THE Heineken Cup burst into life for another season, it struck me how vastly contrasting is the health of rugby in Europe and Australia. In Europe the game continues to leap forward, while in Australia it is in a perilous state.

In the past when the Waratahs or the Wallabies played, they were part of the people. That relationship has deteriorated to the point where the teams seem dislocated from the rugby community they represent.

The great strength of both Irish and French rugby is that the local people, who live in the geographic area of the team, have “ownership” of the team. Leinster is a towering example of an organisation that developed the relationship between the team and its community. The increase in Leinster supporters over the past 13 seasons has been nothing short of phenomenal.

As this relationship between the people and the teams in Irish rugby has grown exponentially, the opposite has occurred in Australia.

It is a state of affairs that gives me great sadness.

The underlying error within rugby in Australia is its inability to expand its player and supporter base in greater Sydney. In Australian sport, if you have Sydney you have Australia.

In the last two years AFL and soccer have established new professional franchises in the western suburbs of Sydney. This is a catchment area of more than three million people.

Rugby has not only neglected this area, it appears to have given up any interest of expansion in Sydney. Perth and Melbourne have been granted Super franchises, but the talent and the rugby savvy population live in the west of Sydney.

The Waratahs Super Rugby franchise is based in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Constant internal political bickering has seen the Wararaths performance plummet and the Sydney people stay away in droves. When I was coaching the Waratahs in the late 1990s we averaged crowds around 25,000. Three years later the Waratahs were selling out the 45,000 seat Sydney Football Stadium.

Since then the attendances have steadily declined, to the point were the Waratahs now regularly play in front of less than 15,000.

The appointment of Michael Cheika to coach the Waratahs is a good one, but the scale of the task confronting him should not be underestimated. There are vested interests that want league and AFL to prosper and rugby to fail. The internal politics are of such complexity, that they make Leinster House look like a Buddhist temple. All these combine to make the Waratahs gig one of the toughest.

Underneath the Waratahs is the “bedrock” of Australian rugby, the Sydney grade competition. I played and coached in this wonderful competition for 20 seasons. This past winter I watched some games and I was appalled in the decline in playing standards. I was also shocked at the number of New Zealand and Polynesian born players that are in the competition. I can find no official statistics however if the figure came back that 40 per cent were foreign born, I would not be surprised.

The Sydney competition, which produced fantastic rugby for generations, a spirit of community and amazing Waratahs and Wallaby players, is now a competition of mediocrity.

Any administrator, who has attempted meaningful reform of the Sydney club competition, has been hounded from office by self-serving blazers, who want rugby to remain as it was in the 1950s.

In 2007 the Australian Rugby Competition (ARC) was formed to sit above the club competition. It was to be the equivalent of the New Zealand ITM Cup and the South African Currie Cup. It was a bold and visionary idea. It was a national competition and had teams in Western Sydney and on the populous central coast north of Sydney at Gosford.

It established rugby away from the traditional heartlands of Sydney’s eastern suburbs.

The competition lasted one season. It was extremely costly to run. There is no doubt it unearthed and exposed a wave of Australian players that other wise would never have been seen at the next level. There is also no doubt that many in the Sydney rugby establishment did not want to see the competition succeed and therefore relegate their club to a lower status.

All this infighting, lack of long term planning and failure to reform has lead to a decline in what, until now, has made Australian rugby great. That is producing creative attacking players.

The Australian system is simply not producing creative players in the numbers and quality it did in the past. As entertainment, Australian rugby lacks the panache of past generations.

Quade Cooper, who was born and bred in New Zealand, tweeted disgraceful comments about the Wallabies culture at a time when the team needed his support.

He placed his own agenda above that of the team. He should never be given a gold jersey again, but he will be, simply because there is no one else.

It has taken a lot of poor decisions, by a lot of people, over a long period of time, to drag Australian rugby to the depths at which it now sits.