Success in rugby league can be broken down into nine simple words: for Christ’s sake hang on to the bloody ball. And that’s it.
Don’t drop the ball in your allotted ‘set’ of six tackles – known as a ‘completion’ – and you’ll go a long way to winning the fixture. True story.
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True-ish, anyway.
Consider the Canberra Raiders. The journo’s team. Timmy Gore’s team. Dammit, the People’s team. Everybody’s second team. The Green Machine.
So very good at rugby league. So very good. At least at the exciting, fun parts of rugby league.
Big units thundering up guts? Check.
Hot-footed backs ripping off funky-fast manoeuvres? Check.
Wing-people able to fly outside the plane of what was once considered the legislated boundaries of the playing field and slam down the ball one-handed bare centimetres inside the dead-ball line? Check, check and check, buddy-roo. The Raiders are the funky-funsters of this man’s National Rugby League and when they’re on and bopping about, rugby league is a happy place.
AAP Image/Mick Tsikas
And yet …
And yet Canberra, for all their happy-pants man-action, sit ninth on the competition ladder. Far from out of it, but, well, let’s say the measured hope of the Raiders fan – for to be a Raiders fan is to measure hope and thus ensure one is not hurt, for love of team is a many-splendored thing and a fickle mistress and … what?
The Raiders?! The People’s Champion sits ninth of the NRL ladder? Yes, because of those nine simple, sweet words: for Christ’s sake hang on to the bloody ball.
If they do that, they’ll also find they’re banking good numbers in two other complementary words which represent the building blocks of successful, point-scoring forays – ‘completion’ of ‘sets’.
It’s that simple.
Not easy, but simple: hang onto the bloody ball, for Christ’s sake, Canberra Raiders, and then the fun, party stuff will happen at the other end, and rugby league will be a happy place.
So, complete those sets, pound up field and crash over and through your opponents, and hear the lamentations of the women (as Conan the Barbarian said in the hit film Conan the Barbarian).
Done and done.
That said, you also have to make ‘tackles’ when you don’t have the ball, as mighty Queensland found out in State of Origin 1 the other night. For all their perfect, crisply-executed and ‘completed’ ‘sets’ – and they were perfect, 18-for-18 in the first half – the Maroons were verily rent asunder because they couldn’t stop the Blues’ massive humans thundering through them like murderous white orcs fresh out the goop.
So there is that element too, of rugby league, to complement the hang onto the bloody ball for Christ’s sake bit, the completed sets, etc.
Now! I have a couple of mates, rugby men, Poms – otherwise good people (jokes! people, jokes!) – who were actually quite bored by Origin the other night, given they were not invested either way in the result.
True story.
They knew not of the context of the fixture. They watched only because they were in a pub, it was on the box, and they were looking to be entertained by the spectacle as everyone else seemed to be.
But their problem – and it’s many league folks’ problem when watching union – was they focused only on the aesthetics of the game, on the look of it, and not on the competition.
And they compared it, like leaguies do, to their own game. And all those perfect completed sets? Left them quite cold.
Said one: “People in the pub were saying, ‘This is great, it’s end to end.’ Yes, it was end to end. That was the problem! They’d run it up, get tackled, play the ball, and kick. Then it was the other team’s turn.”
Now! Hold up! Before any Rusted-on League Types (ROLTs) sharpen their claws and chop into the keyboard with poisonous fingers a-fire, hold up.
For I did seek to educate these chaps on the subtleties and nuance of the extreme collision man-action that they had witnessed.
To wit:
“They aren’t just mindless hit-ups. Origin is the most brutal one-on-one body contact man-action in world sport. That is a ridiculously fleet-footed 120-kilogram man charging full tilt at several fellows who wouldn’t give you change from half a tonne.
“And they too are running full tilt.
“And they are fired up with hatred. Maybe not hatred. Not actual hatred, anyway. Hate is too strong a word.
“But these are the biggest and best league men in the land. They aren’t faffing about or mucking around. It is freakin’ on in the middle of that park, buddy-roo. It is on.
“And to sneer at league as ‘five tackles and a kick’ is to very much miss the point.”
And the boys agreed to disagree and we got back to arguing about whose shout it was and cricket.
AAP Image/Dan Himbrechts
Now, again, Roaring ROLTers, hold up. Code-war arguments are a little old, even if it appears I’m looking to set one aflame here. I’m not, true.
Well, maybe a bit.
Ha! No, I’m not, true.
But I will say this: the two rugby codes are vastly different. And I love them both. And I don’t know why most people don’t, you know, love both, as they love other things, like different sorts of books and movies and holidays and sundry entertainments. A tale for another time.
For now, consider one-time leaguie Ratu Tagive, a former Campbelltown kid whom I interviewed during the week.
Ratu played lower grades for Bulldogs and Wests Tigers but stopped to support his family, before his girlfriend sent a video package of him playing footy to Stephen Larkham, who gave him something of a go with the Brumbies and Queanbeyan Whites, and a few little gigs here and there.
Today, in the global ways of the XV-person game, Ratu’s playing on the wing for Glasgow Warriors, and living with his girlfriend who’s running an online business from their flash unit in the middle of town.
Ratu said this of his time in rah-rah:
“I used to look at [rugby union] and think of all the space there was for an outside back. I thought you could take on the defence. But tactically it’s about not isolating yourself.
“A lot of leaguies have the misconception that rugby is … not ‘soft’ but not as confrontational, less collisions. But it’s because of the technicality, of getting your body in position after the tackle to manipulate the man.
“There’s different techniques in tackling. They’re big on low ‘chop’ tackles bringing guys down. Chop the big boys down so you get your hunters in there to get the ball.
“In league you’re taught to tackle high, wrestle, wrap the ball up. But rugby is much more technical. I’ve been telling my leaguie mates, it’s not as easy as I first thought!”
Nor is hanging onto the bloody ball for Christ’s sake in such a jolting collision action sport as rugby league.
But if the Raiders do that they’ll win the comp.
A (largely) true story.
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