“Look at what the boneheads have done,” McLennan told this masthead. “They are arrogant and dopey.”
The collapse of the Harvey Norman deal is a major blow for RA as it deals with the fallout from the axing of McLennan and the Wallabies’ dire Rugby World Cup campaign. It also leaves it looking for a financial backer for next year’s Super Rugby season,for which Harvey Norman has been the naming-rights sponsor since 2021.
Harvey said the company was pursuing other sponsorship opportunities in other sports.
“What we do is,we do whatever sport for a while;we don’t necessarily hang on to it forever,” Harvey said. “So we move around on different sports so we’re very heavy into sport advertising that we don’t necessarily stay with the one sport forever.
“You know we think,‘Oh we’ve given that a good go,then we’ll go on to the next one’. In all cases,we stop at some stage.”
When asked whether the sponsorship was being dropped because of the move against McLennan,Harvey replied:“No,no,no,no. It’s just the sport itself. So we do that for a while then move on to the next one.
“And you know,at some stage – like we’re doing basketball at the moment,we’ve never done that before. At some stage,we’ll drop off that and go back and do something else.”