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In the end, City-Country died because too few gave a stuff. Players, fans, coaches, clubs, broadcasters. Plenty of lip service, not enough giving an actual stuff.
Why would you? The match has no real import. It has too little consequence outside an injury list.
It’s not about State of Origin. The NSW team is picked, or good as.
Laurie Daley knows if blokes can play or not. The match might earmark a couple as up for it, or otherwise, down the track. But Daley has 20-odd blokes pencilled in for the blue jumper. There’d be that many again in his Emerging Blues.
NSW selectors already know if you can play.
Furthermore Queensland is the epicentre of rugby league. Why would Maroons fans care about a NSW trial that NSW doesn’t care about?
Country Rugby League boss Terry Quinn is right that City-Country is where some internationals first played rep footy. But it’s a long time since Mick Cronin.
And today the value of either jumper is greatly diminished.
City-Country is less breeding ground as parade ring for the odd handy colt.
And fact is if you’re a chance of playing State of Origin, someone in good recent form for club, and with a decent CV over the last few years, the best thing you could do was not play in the City-Country.
Why risk injury for an exhibition? The selectors know you can play. You’ve been on the radar. There’s no point.
No-one would admit it publicly. But it’s fact – City-Country’s on the nose because of the primacy of club and Origin footy.
Why host a “rep trial” for NSW selectors that already knows the team? Players aren’t mugs. Their management aren’t mugs.
Coaches and club CEOs and senior management, definitely, aren’t mugs. They essentially manage a small business.
Some of them begrudge State of Origin for making off with “their” employees. Why risk the prime horse flesh for an exhibition?
Blokes have been pulled out for all sorts of “injuries”. Some players have looked at it like a bye. Week off! You beauty.
Punters know this. Even those bushies rugby league pays so much lip service too.
Granted Tamworth last year attracted 8317 people to Scully Park, which looked pretty full. They sold out Wagga Wagga in 2015 (crowd 9127) and Dubbo in 2014 (9627).
They didn’t sell out Coffs Harbour in 2013 and the official crowd of 4645 looked like they were counting the arms and legs of millipedes.
Nope. The game doesn’t matter.
Name the last bolter into a blue jumper. And you can’t count Jack Bird, Tyson Frizell or Josh Mansour because you know they can play. You see it every week.
The last game in Tamworth was a 44-30 win for City. There was skill and endeavour, and it was an “entertaining” game if you like that sort of thing.
But it was Micky Mouse. It was one up from Oz Tag. Why fully commit your body for that jumper? Why risk wrecking your season, your club’s season, for a match of no consequence?
True, it’s hard to play rugby league without full commitment. You can’t not go in hard. You can’t play footy thinking you have to avoid injury.
But you aren’t playing like Les Boyd on a bender.
CRL boss Quinn, while admitting the decision to scrap the fixture is “the best way forward”, told reporters he and the CRL are “not happy.
“It’s sad to lose this game,” he said.
“You look at the current Australian side and a lot of those guys got their start with the Country and the City side.
“I know we’ve got selectors everywhere but that test of man against man settles a lot.”
Yeah, not really.
Yes, it was fine sport to see Panthers’ prop Reagan Campbell-Gillard tearing into the hard-charging baby-faced behemoth Shannon Boyd of Canberra. Go hard, mad punks.
But it didn’t matter. Because none of it mattered.
And there, in the end, was the rub.
And as such TV can no longer sell the game because it doesn’t involve enough stars and is a fixture with no consequence.
And so the last – for a good long while, anyway – City-Country game will be played in Mudgee in May, and you will get worse than Winx odds that Channel Nine will trot out the retiring Kenny Sutcliffe for a last go-around.
The station knows how to entertain, knows how to sell eyeballs on screens. And they did their best over the years with scenes of men and beer on roof-tops illustrating the match’s appeal in the bush.
But ultimately, even these experts in ad-sales couldn’t sell City-Country.
RIP footy match. Pass the beer nuts.