ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
The board of Rugby Australia has asked the pigeon in charge of their marketing department to resign over allegations he used the ironically broke sporting code’s last $1m to buy promotional surfboards.
For twelve-hundred Australian pesos, anyone can purchase a golden surfboard with the Wallabies logo slapped on the underside of it. It’s understood by The Advocate that the pigeon purchased close to a thousand of them and they’re currently being stored at the pigeon’s father’s Avoca beach house on the New South Wales Central Coast.
It was one of the largest purchases by Rugby Australia in recent years and comes after some troubling times that the organisation was looking forward to putting behind it.
However, this latest error by the marketing pigeon comes at a tough time for the Wallabies, who just lost to Scotland in Scotland and now the company credit cards have stopped working.
Speaking to The Advocate today, rugby boss Hamish McLennan took time out of his busy morning of stripping the copper from the walls and ceilings at Rugby HQ to speak candidly to our reporter about what the organisation plans to do next.
“We are selling copper to make sure the team makes it to London by the weekend. That there’s enough money in the account to make sure they’re fed. Match fees, at this stage, will be pegged back to what they were in 1975,” he said.
“As for the pigeon, well I’ve asked him to resign because his little surfboard stunt and torpedoed us. First of all, who in the hell would want a Wallabies surfboard? And if they did, would they pay $1200 for it? Absolutely not. If you were going to spend that much on a surfboard, you’d go to a surfboard shop and buy a surfboard from someone who makes surfboards, you wouldn’t buy one online from the Wallabies shop, would you?”
“It’s one thing to drop ten or fifteen grand on a bunch of Wallabies-themed Hawaiian shirts that’ll probably end up in a smoking pile of rags in Ghana. It’s another to spend a million dollars on surfboards,”
“I’m just lost for words.”
More to come.
