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Rugby league is a tough game. On the field there’s little room to hide from the relentless repetition of heavily built men running headlong into the charging shoulders of their opposition.
Once that whistle goes the players enter a straight-shootin’, two dimensional world wherein the only truths that matter are meters gained and tackles missed.
If ever there was a game that called a spade a bloody shovel its rugby league.
So what’s all this nonsense about a World Cup?
The poor man’s rugby union World Cup is essentially an Australian product targeted at Australian audiences for the benefit of an Australian broadcaster. The English input into the event lingers much like the union jack on the north western margin of Australia’s flag, being dragged along by the greater southern body.
The influence of other nations represented at the event is similar to what you would find at your average state primary schools’ ‘multicultural awareness’ day, where children are invited to stand up and tell the class what country their great-great grandmother came from and all the kids with slightly different sounding last names get their mums to bring in a plate of their home land’s favourite delicacy.
The promotional advertisements for the World Cup are reminiscent of a scene from ‘the Simpsons’ where a heavily intoxicated Lisa freaks out whilst taking the ‘It’s a small world after all’ ride at Duff Gardens. Surrounded by hordes of animatronic clones distinguishable only by their garish national dress, Lisa loses it amidst the contrived chorus where world unity is only facilitated by the consumption of a product of questionable nutritional value.
From 1954 until 1975 the game adopted the ‘if you build it, they will come’ mantra and the first six rugby league World Cups were contested by only four teams; Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain and France. However after nearly 20 years of building it, only the Welsh came thanks largely to some pretty heavy raids upon that principality’s rugby union stocks and the convenient devolution of Great Britain into two sides. Sadly, after only one showing the boyos disappeared before the next version of the event in 1979 leaving it to be contested again by only four teams.
The next two rugby league World Cups were bizarrely each held over three years however this time the original four nations were joined by Papua New Guinea. So it was that after ten World Cups, roughly 100 years of professionalism and all of the media and political support that follows the interests of the masses, rugby league, that great beneficiary of Australia’s cultural cringe, had failed to make any meaningful growth beyond its tradition boundaries.
In 1995 a different path was taken. This time rather than sitting there, looking hopefully to the horizon waiting for somebody, anybody to show an interest in ‘our game’, league’s administrators decided that if other nations weren’t going to send teams of their own free will, rugby league would make teams for them. Whether they were interested or not.
As it turns out they probably weren’t. In the same year the still amateur rugby union held only its third World Cup and yet was able to more than double the average attendance figures of its professional counterpart whilst playing more than twice as many games.
Rugby’s 1995 World Cup gave the sporting world two lasting memories; Nelson Mandela wearing the Springbok jersey and Jonah Lomu running straight over the top of the hapless Mike Catt, thereby giving rugby not only its most iconic highlight reel but its first global superstar.
Only the most ardent rugby league supporter would be able to recall a single highlight from that code’s 1995 World Cup. If only international rugby league could have remained content in such optimistic mediocrity. Sadly over-ambition led the next World Cup into farce.
Buoyed by delusions of legitimacy, league’s international administrators decided to continue with their policy of creating international teams where none previously existed as had been the case with Ireland in 1995. In a move that seems like it came from a Will Ferrell movie, a ‘Lebanese’ team was artificially created entirely from Australians of Lebanese origin. When rugby league ran out of countries willing to nurture the gift of league, it found a way around the problem by once again duplicating nations. New Zealand and New Zealand Maori were deemed sufficiently distinct entities to warrant separate representation.
You see, that is the great thing about rugby league – it brings people together.
Fortunately this nefarious piece of political propaganda failed to net New Zealand a piece of silverwear as Australia inevitably took its ninth title in front of crowds that averaged a little over eight thousand. The event left the RFL in debt for four years and was so disastrous it pushed back the next World Cup until 2008.
And so here we are at the 13th rugby league World Cup and what does it tell us about the growth of the game.
All of the ten team captains play in one of two competitions; Australia’s National Rugby League and “Europe’s” Super League. France, 54 years since instigating the World Cup as a means of rebuilding their national competition, today fields only one team worthy of first class competition and New Zealand’s league future remains almost completely dependant upon that of Australia’s domestic competition.
By and large the game remains as it was 54 years ago, with strongholds in the north of England and the east of Australia and scatterings of interest in southern France and New Zealand. Where rugby exists, league will always find root and as such league finds its growth strangely dependant upon that of its rival code.
The most commonly cited exception is Papua New Guinea where rugby league enjoys a following of religious proportions and has achieved its status on its own merits. With all due respect to the people of PNG, this development is unlikely to yield either financial rewards or increased potential for further growth of the game as the country lacks the necessary infrastructure to accommodate a self-sufficient domestic competition of comparable quality to the NRL.
Its time for rugby league to stop trying to fool itself into believing it is a game of sufficient breadth to warrant a World Cup and start telling it like it is. The rugby league world consists of two fine domestic competitions, each rubbing cosily up against a promising but largely uncommitted neighbour much like an overzealous schoolboy on a disinterested maiden at a blue light disco.
All the rest is feel-good hyperbole not worthy of a game that, at least on the field, suffers few pretensions.
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