There is simply no way the 16 clubs can walk away from the ARL and News Ltd, form a breakaway competition and expect to survive. For starters, who is going to fund it? Where are the players going to come from once we get a few years down the track and need to start turning over our rosters?

It sounds easy to say we'll pick up juniors like we always have, but those kids will be playing in ARL junior competitions - and you can bet by then the ARL will have ensured they stay in whatever competition they have up and running by then. The 16 clubs won't have the money to independently fund junior league competitions.

Also, the licensing agreements are held by the NRL, so how do we market ourselves in this new competition? We wouldn't be able to take the iconic names - the South Sydney Rabbitohs, for example. That would have to stay with the organisation we have just turned our backs on.

It makes you wonder whether some people learned anything from the Super League war. As a coach, I can tell you all the clubs, like the people, want an independent commission. We have built the game to a stage where the product on the field is such that the rest of the game needs to catch up.

As the battle for the sponsorship dollar gets tougher, as other sports creep into what has always been traditionally rugby league territory, we cannot simply expect to remain the No. 1 winter code. We need an independent commission to come in and make sure games like this year's Parramatta-St George Illawarra quarter-final, for example, are played in front of the biggest audiences we can get.

We need the game to be run according to what is in the best interests of rugby league - not individual clubs. For years we have argued there are too many rugby league boards stifling the game, pushing and pulling against each other. This is our best chance to correct that.

So let's be smart about what could be our most important step for the next 100 years. What excites me is talk of some of the business people who might be brought in to help form the commission, like John Quayle. This threat to form a breakaway competition is simply a ploy, and a pretty thinly veiled one, to ramp up pressure on the ARL and News Ltd to get the independent commission signed off.

This January meeting was always being organised for clubs to get together and go through the working paper the ARL and News Ltd have come up with to return the ownership of the game to the people. It was going to be our first chance to have a look at it together, all 16 clubs, and go through the merits of the proposal.

Yet some have made it look like a power play. It is a desperate ploy and a good example that some of the people involved in running the game should not be - and that an independent commission can't come soon enough.