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I had a busy weekend at the Sydney Football Stadium, attending the World Club Challenge on Saturday night before heading straight back the following afternoon to watch the Waratahs open their 2014 Super Rugby season.
Suffice it to say I was reasonably pleased all up.
But while I was happy with seeing strong six-try victories to both my teams, it was the World Club Challenge that has lingered on most in my mind.
Here was a game that has received the barest minimum of publicity, featuring an NRL team that is derided for having fans that generally don’t get out in numbers to see their team.
Yet for all that, over 31,000 people filled out the SFS on Saturday night, and it felt like quite a bit more.
People can quibble over the predictability of the result, but from where I was sitting the game was a brilliantly successful event, with plenty of passion and aggression on show from both teams and plenty of noise in the stands.
It certainly got me thinking– why can’t we do more with this? Why shouldn’t this game be a bigger deal?
It’s a match that has been increasing in importance to Australian teams over the past 10 years, a fact reflected in our recent domination of the fixture. NRL teams have now won five of the last six WCC matches after a long period of Super League domination in which we insultingly sent weak squads over to England.
The problem with the WCC has never been the idea itself, but rather that it was poorly executed from the outset.
The very fact that it is at the beginning of the season after many players have come and gone from the championship team makes a mockery of the title it bestows on the victors.
But in spite of its half-hearted execution, the attempt to bring the NRL and Super League together appears to be increasingly gaining traction, with reports that South Sydney and Brisbane are already airing their interest in an extended six-team World Club Challenge playoff series.
It’s an interesting idea, but personally I think that there’s a much better one: an NRL v Super League ‘Super Bowl’.
Of course, we can’t call it that (the NFL is notoriously litigious regarding the use of the name Super Bowl), but you get the idea – an ultimate final that definitively decides the best rugby league club in the world.
A couple things would need to be done to make this happen.
First, you would need to align both the NRL and Super League to ensure that they finished on the same weekend.
From there, you would shift the World Club Challenge to two to three weeks after the grand finals to make it a genuine championship match. Perhaps it could be renamed the ‘World Club Final’ or ‘Super Grand Final’ – I’m sure someone in marketing can think of something short and attention-grabbing.
Whatever you call it, the match could be alternated between the UK and Australia each year, and if successful the governing bodies could even look at shopping it around to non-heartland locations like London or Melbourne (Origin does alright there).
As an event it would serve as a point of difference for rugby league, help strengthen the profile of the game in both the UK and Australia, and it would crown a genuine Rugby League Club World Champ.
All it would require is for both the NRL and Super League to get fully behind it, and with strong TV deals funding both governing bodies now there’s no reason why this can’t be done.
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