It may as well have been Reverend Green in the kitchen with the candlestick. Barely a figure, idea, theme, program or official from ARU central casting has been left unscathed in the wake of the Bledisloe disaster, which to many confirmed their worst fears about the state of the Australian game.

Michael Cheika, his assistant coaches and the Wallaby players were the obvious lightning rods for disgruntled fans, who are becoming less in number but ever louder as the code they love lurches from crisis to crisis.

Yet if it's accurate to suggest the Wallabies are given the lion's share of the game's resources to ensure their competitiveness, it's equally true that they are the visible tip of an iceberg that has started to fracture below the waterline.

All of the game's pillars, from Super Rugby to the club scene to the schools, are in need of renovation, rejuvenation and in some cases, to simply be blown up and started all over again under the watch of fresh eyes.

It's not as if key people in Australian rugby are wholly ignorant of the challenges. The day before Saturday night's Test in Sydney, a gathering of prominent officials met to discuss a new model for the high-performance area of the game.

Part of it was to foster better relationships between the Super Rugby outposts and the ARU, although doubters would question whether some of the game's usual suspects - John Eales, Cameron Clyne, Brett Robinson - were the ideal candidates to produce radical ideas.

Elsewhere, players, coaches and officials are openly wondering how to invigorate a sport that proudly spruiks its global appeal, yet has edged towards a precipice on Australian shores.

Super Rugby

Dean Mumm, the recently retired Waratahs forward, admits the clunky, complicated Super Rugby format left even the players confused. When fans would quiz him about why some teams don't play others, for example, the answer wasn't always forthcoming.

"Super Rugby needs to re-engage those that love it and get the faithful back on board. There are a lot of people that are rusted-on fans that are disillusioned with it. And that's where Super Rugby didn't help this year," Mumm said.

"Even as a player in the competition, you didn't always know how it worked. People would come up to me and say that a South African team doesn't play any Kiwi teams. That doesn't make much sense.

"The draw wasn't optimal for people's understanding and therefore, their enjoyment."

Super Rugby in Australia this season was an abomination. Not a solitary franchise could boast a win over a New Zealand foe, while the very fabric of the competition is now in the hands of the courts as the Western Force fight for their existence.

Mumm, also the president of the Rugby Union Players Association, could literally feel the connection with fans slipping as he tried to fight from inside a machine most now agree has failed Australian rugby badly. That magical ingredient of great sporting contests - tribalism - has vanished as teams campaign at the wee hours, against barely known opponents.

"Ultimately, just because you are playing doesn't mean you aren't immune to hearing what people think about Super Rugby," Mumm said. "You want their engagement in the competition, engagement with us as a team. It's important the structure is clear and concise and easy for people to understand.

"In club rugby there's an element of tribalism. They have history there and they can embrace that history. Tribalism goes both ways. It's an engagement with your team but it's also with the other team.

"You have to understand their scenario and where they come from. That's what you get with club rugby ... there's a rivalry between Easts and Randwick. Everyone seems to have a rivalry with Uni. There's two sides to the story."

Still, Mumm has hope. But for Super Rugby to work, he says, it needs to be stripped down and rebuilt as a competition that doesn't require a phone call to Stephen Hawking to decipher its inner-workings.

"You have to play every team. That's very simple. It creates a level playing field. I don't believe that every nation deserves a home semi-final. If you're good enough, you get one. Make it a genuine competition where you get rewards for being the best.

"It's still a great code. I still believe when you get a great game of rugby, it's the best game going around. It's the management and some other areas that hasn't helped show the true nature of it."

Club rugby

If "stakeholder" is the word of the week for Australian rugby, then "grassroots" isn't far behind. And by that, they really mean club rugby, which has defied the gloom that currently surrounds the code by experiencing a bounce in numbers, interest and crowds.

It may well be an organic revolt to the doldrums of the professional ranks, or an embrace of the outsider status many feel bestowed upon them by a governing body that has left them in the financial wilderness. That sentiment has become so powerful that to certain sections of clubland, it's become and us-against-them scenario, a war within a war.

In Sydney, the response to the Shute Shield has been impressive. Some 10,000 fans watched the Warringah Rats beat rivals Manly to earn a spot against Norths in this weekend's grand final, which stands to draw an even bigger crowd.

In Brisbane last weekend, they were trucking kegs of XXXX into Ballymore like the glory days. The Red Heavies of UQ would triumph over GPS to win the Hospital Cup in front of almost 7000 supporters.

"A common piece of feedback we get from supporters is that they are disenfranchised with Super Rugby. They don't go and watch Super Rugby but they love coming down to Uni on Saturday and watching some good rugby," Uni coach Mick Heenan said.

"That might be because they feel closer to the players or have another connection but they seem to get a lot of enjoyment out of just being at that grassroots level.

"Tribalism is part of it. They also like to see teams win. In club footy, they get some return on that investment. In Super Rugby, we haven't seen a lot of success over the past few years."

In theory, club rugby should complement Super Rugby, with the success of one strengthening the other. Instead, Heenan says, one has managed to grate against the other, with both competitions paying a price.

"Super Rugby has certainly had an adverse impact on the quality of club footy over the years. The more Super Rugby franchises that have come in, the lower the quality because the better players get hoovered up by the franchises.

"It's taken a while but club rugby in the past few years has bounced back. We don't know the future direction of Australian rugby but clearly Super Rugby doesn't work. It doesn't work for the grassroots, it doesn't work for the supporter. You need a connection with the players on the field."

While there might be some cool vibes out on the suburban grounds, the question now for Australian rugby is exactly what part do the clubs play in the broader picture? Getting people to come and enjoy a beer and a snag is one thing. Becoming a genuine and productive second-tier for the code is another.

The answer? Empower the clubs, says Heenan, who doesn't see why the Sydney and Brisbane competitions can't become as powerful and useful as rugby league's excellent Intrust Super Cup competitions in coming years.

"There's something in that. Nobody has paid any attention to club rugby for so long and yet we're seeing a resurgence there. We just won't know unless we give it a go.

"More broadly, Super Rugby needs to go head-to-head with the NRL and have the same footprint in terms of time. But that will all take some time."

Schools rugby

For so long a foundation of rugby, this may be the most challenging sector of them all to reform, partly because the ARU has little to no control over one of its key elite pathways.

When you say that out loud, it's as strange as it sounds. But amid a maze of tradition, disjointed competitions in need of a shake-up and and imperfect links between schools and clubs, it's clear much of the work in rugby needs to begin at the very bottom.

The ARU has already tried to start the process, with former Wallaby Paul McLean in charge of a working party trying to lay out a blueprint for the schools game, encompassing everything from safety, fairness of competitions and pathways for talented players, many of whom may not be campaigning within one of the traditional GPS competitions.

Among the myriad issues is that the demographics of many of the traditional schools are shifting. Other sports are moving in, while some are putting less focus on the code. The weak get weaker, the strong get stronger.

In Brisbane, the shifting sands of the system can be seen by the slow return of rugby league to schools that, in some case, hadn't played the code in any meaningful capacity since the 1950s. Marist Ashgrove, the former school of John Eales, has been one to embrace the annual Confraternity Shield, which gives its players almost as many games in a few days as they play in a an entire rugby term.

"The rugby season is seven games. The boys play six games of league over the carnival. It's intense. Our boys who play, they have to play rugby at some level. It's a part of the culture here and it's a growing part of the culture at other schools like Marist Ashgrove," says Peter Elmore, one of the organisers of the tournament and Rector at Padua College, which plays both codes.

"We haven't cracked the GPS schools but all it would take is for one of them to ask. We play Union here, we honour that code. My take is that if Union (officials) are worried about league, they are missing the big picture.

"There are other codes out there that are fast approaching. If they are fixated on the league v union thing, that's a story that's well and truly dead for most people."

Youth representative sides remain almost exclusively the domain of the elite schools, while the code has become simply non-existent in parts of the bush and the regions. It's not even in the fight for the indigenous talent that regularly star for the rival winter codes.