By Sam Ryan It’s been an interesting year or two for Australian rugby, particularly from a professional sense. As the 2017 season draws to a close, Rugby News sat down with ARU High Performance Manager Ben Whitaker in a two part interview to discuss the future of the professional game and all it’s elements in Australia.  Rugby News: How do you look back on the past year or so and where is Australian rugby at the moment? Ben Whitaker: I think particularly over the last four months, we’ve got a lot of people together to look at what we need to do build our capability to win. No one is happy about our results over the last year or so but I think what it has done is ensured that everyone has learnt along the way, so hopefully we won’t see history repeat itself. People are quick to forget that we actually won the Super Rugby title in 2011 and 2014, we were runners up in the World Cup when we were 20 minutes shy of beating one of the best teams ever, so it’s not as tho