The Big Relauch of Sports in Australia(Kobo/電子書)

An amazing once in a lifetime opportunity came our way just last month. It was scary in its scale and ominous in its promise of bombarding us with mountains of criticism, but overall it gave us the keys to the building. We’re not talking any old building here.

We proudly present the brand-new space-age power-centre for making a significantly better future for our part of the world. No, I’m not talking about a visit by the British royal family, or by any actor, politician, tiktok sensation or musician. I am talking about an explosion of new action formats for team sports down under. We have a lot of tough planning ahead of us, but we're SO GLAD we got our offer cash accepted, that we struck a deal and are now in possession of everything we require to make our biggest dreams become reality. Now the future is ours.

By buying the whole product, along with the rights to this portion of all existing player contracts that come with it, our company has obtained the official power to expand, rethink and replace the state of origin game completely. Yes, we could have kept it in its tired old format, but we opted for the hard to win people over route of change and renewal. With unthinkable power comes unthinkable responsibility.

Now that our ambitious young and energetic new company, Relaunch, has this power, let's make absolutely sure that we use it to the best of our ability. We are not the sort of entity who just wants to profit maximise, to think short-term, to flourish through injury and car crash tellie, to dumb down to the lowest common denominator or to run a series of high-profile showdowns to which everybody knows the likely outcome in advance.

Nevertheless, the full package rights, remit, office, management, officials, governing body and product purchase of all state of origin and all locality and ‘statoid’ events in Australia in a rare and unique auction to benefit all the major governing bodies in one go has given our company substantial debt, which we will need to try to manage in a clever and mature longtermist way. We are committed to restricting the growth of our debt over the next three years and to paying it off in full over the next 14 years after that.

Each contributing factor has been planned out, and now we must hope and pray that reality sticks to the script that we have written for it. We can deal with a few disappointments as they pop up, as well as with a few mistakes, difficult political and weather circumstances and unexpected disasters, but let's be clear: if more goes wrong than what our loan terms can handle, our utopia is at stake and we could go bust!

The plans have been worked on with careful consideration of our higher ethical values, with special emphasis given to the desire to come up with a new format of state of origin sports for Australia that will have way more than two teams who could realistically win the top prize with a strong performance, and we insist on achieving this without shuffling players over to states that need more – which would ruin the purity, the definition and the framework of the state of origin system we know and love. Rather than have most teams stay massive outsiders and underdogs forever, as would otherwise have occurred, our new vision will bring in different frontrunners from year to year, without shifting the boundaries that much.

Our new utopias will be giving lots of big and small areas a turn at the top and a roller-coaster ride of genuine excitement all over the top five, the top ten and the places beneath, all striving for a place in the top ten, all bringing heightened viewer involvement and a moderated and decreased likelihood of disappointment too, while also reducing the likelihood that the same team wins every time. If we were simply a simplistic profit maximiser, our approach, strategy and boundary-setting verdict might be very different than this.

It would involve letting the big three states, NSW, Queensland and Victoria continue to dominate the state of origin bracket in the usual inevitable and obvious way for evermore and cashing in big time while they do so. What we are seeking to do instead is to create not just a better world, but the best kind of world we can, just balanced, fair, vibrant, lively, true to people’s real place of origin and more exciting through offering more unpredictable possible outcomes and hence more of a process of excitement and gradual realisation of where each team made it to this year.

This sort of thing really does not happen much, it he world we live in. Hardly ever. But on this one occasion, it did: the power to expand, rethink and replace the state of origin game was awarded by the powers that be. It was wonderful. And would you believe it, a panel of five people including me, Mr Iqbal Kourtaki and my Relaunch buddies Joel Nasmith, Jack Kaverda, Susan Patollward and Nina Crawford was, by submitting the winning bid, given the power to decide.

And decide we did. We had a lot of interesting options to evaluate, some wild, some elaborate, some far-reaching, some complicated, and some controversial. We really wanted to make sure that we chose the best of these ideas, and that we did not lose the integrity of the competition. It was quite a process, and we opened several stages of this process up to the Australian public to help evaluate our various ideas and to help us find the best solutions for each problem we faced.

Each of the five managerial planning panel members came up with some promising ideas, and rather than just accept or deny these ideas, we put them to a public vote, through our website and through our youtube channel, and this allowed us to learn more about what gets the fans excited about. Our main collective instinct was one of trying to avoid what you currently get in many sports, such as in the African, Asian and South American rugby union championship, where the same team, South Africa, Japan or Argentina, wins each and every time, by a colossal and predictable margin, by country mile. These are not competitions. They are ritualized maulings. These (and a few other example from other team sports) were our main 'how not to do it' examples. In these contests, all the other regional country teams are only there to be make up the numbers and to be cruelly, violently, viciously, predictably, unavoidably and mercilessly destroyed each and every time.

Sports contests that are pre-scripted not in that the athletes act and pretend, but in that all the top players are assembled in the same team, a team that also has budgetary, coaching and physio advantages on top. These examples show how ours can sometimes be a planet of evil sadistic monster villains, and way too often you and I and the world has been complacent in allowing this to continue. What we decide to create is the opposite: a positive world of good opportunties, good games, and good viewing for all. Find out how we faired. You may be impressed with what all we came up with, and with how the world responded when we rolled our fab new ideas out.

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