Many people in the eastern states and the far-eastern states (Otago, Canterbury, Waikato etc) would like to get rid of the Western Force. Nobody likes that flight over, even less the red-eye back. Apparently the jet lag from a trip to Perth is worse than flying to New York via Buenos Aires and the Falkland Islands. In a Sopwith Camel. The Force have not produced a decent Wallabies player since Dane Haylett-Petty. Finally, in the logic of contemporary rugby, there is one clinching argument: given that the reason to chop an Australian team is fundamentally financial, it would make perfect sense for the one Unleaded Rugby franchise that has turned a buck to be the one to go.

There are many sound reasons to keep the Rebels. First, the all-important footprint. How could any code presume to call itself "national", and dare to ask to be broadcast on Fox Sports, if it had no presence in a city where Marike Koroibete can be sold as a "superstar"? What kind of ludicrous, laughable "footprint" would it be if it did not have a distended and genetically anomalous long second toe? Would anyone know Unleaded Rugby was played anymore, would people cease to flock to watch it, if it did not have a team in Australia's second-largest and first-grandest city? Most importantly, though, sacrificing the Melbourne Rebels would invite the impertinent suggestion that an architect who built a five-bedroom house is perhaps not the best person to be hired to demolish the excessive and unaffordable fifth. Those who built the Melbourne Rebels would surely die from their own blushes if they were still in office when it was dismantled a mere six years later. They would be forced to resign, at the very least. And we can't have that. So the Rebels are safe. And their results on the field prove it. These are not the results of a team fighting for survival, but of one that knows it has been inexcusably left alive.

The smart money at the big end of town has long been on the Brumbies, just as it was on Hillary Clinton. If it seems beyond belief that the club that topped the Unleaded Rugby ladder in 2000, 2001 and 2004, won the final in 2001 and 2004, made the semi-finals in those years plus 1997, 2002, 2003, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016, and has produced - actually produced, not bought in - such glittering talent as Stephen Larkham, George Gregan, Matt Giteau and Joe Roff, and would have produced the Great Campo if it had been Super enough in his day ??? I'm so breathless now that I can't remember where this sentence started ??? Point being, how could the Brumbies, whose record over 20 years has stomped all over the other Australian franchises, including the unmentionables, be dumped?

Well, precisely because, as Meryl Streep found when she was Sophie, in this choice there is no choice. Someone has to be handed over to the baddies. The Brumbies are the tip. It would be completely logical for the rulers of rugby to grab a team that has a long-established and welded-on group of supporters and a tradition of success that is more superer than anyone else's in Australia, to fling all of that back in the fans' faces. Serves you right for being so sentimental.

Did it have to come to this? Does anyone have to go? Apart from the fact that it is bleeding money and losing viewers, has a competition format that is as easy to understand as Finnegans Wake, produces a weekly diet of merciless thrashings for the viewer and thorough beatings for the Australian teams, before, in mid-season, suddenly stopping before starting again, Unleaded Rugby is doing just dandy. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If it is completely broke, if it's out on the bones of its arse broke, then find someone else to throw under the bus.

Some managers, in rugby and elsewhere, grow in self-belief and stature when they get to make someone else redundant. As the incomparable Peter Roebuck once wrote, nothing is better for a batsman's confidence than to see partner after partner fail at the other end. In rugby's constituency, there will be a strong brutalist sense of renewal from those who survive the chop and an assurance that without rationalisation there is no progress (as long as they're not the ones who are rationalised). To retrench others is a very rugby way of dealing with a problem of one's own making.

There have been arguments to save all the Australian rugby teams and quit the Unleaded model, instead creating an Oceania-based competition between Australia, New Zealand and all the island nations they pillage for their talent. It's hard to see this working. If part of Australia's purpose in having five Unleaded teams was to build depth for the Wallabies, what sense is there in giving greater opportunity for Samoans, Tongans and Fijians to represent their own countries? How could the mighty All Blacks brand survive it?

Other innovative ideas, such as promotion-relegation, attacking the AFL in its soft underbelly by starting an Adelaide franchise, and putting money back into rugby's grassroots so it might actually fertilise a healthy sport, remain untouched in the world rugby suggestion box, which the tea lady has been working her way through since 1965 (she's now up to 1979). It's time for a choice. Rugby must be brave and bold. It must be decisive. It must draw inspiration from what Sophie did. The parents of this abominable situation must bail out, tell themselves they tried their best, and leave their mess for someone else to fix.