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After witnessing a bit of interest in my proposal to shift next season’s World Club Challenge to Melbourne, and with a bit of time before the Four Nations kicks off, I thought I’d put the idea to Leeds Rhinos CEO, Gary Hetherington.
Hetherington has a bit of reputation in the UK as something of a rugby league visionary. In Australia he’d probably be anointed a ‘good operator’ and seems at ease talking about rugby league expanding beyond the renowned the M62 corridor.
As a background, he explained that the WCC concept is joint owned by England’s Rugby Football League (RFL) and Australia’s NRL, so any change to the format needs to be managed and directed by those bodies.
He also explained that the reason the game had been held in the UK over the past season was down to the respective seasons and the certainty of income that could come from playing the game in England.
In regards to the first point, he said that the thought that match could potentially be played in North Queensland in middle of February was a turn off to both competitions (England, it seemed, were always able to guarantee a cold evening).
Hetherington also revealed to The Roar that he had previously worked on taking to game to locations such as Dubai and Singapore. He felt that they held the attraction of being “in between” both hemispheres, as well as locations with a history of staging such events in the sporting world.
The stumbling block was finding an organisation keen to back the concept to make it more financially attractive than the status quo.
While that project remains a work in progress, Hetherington is also looking to build support for an expanded competition, which would see the top three sides from each competition playing off over one ‘blockbuster’ weekend.
“We’d hope that this sort of concept could grow to have an almost State of Origin appeal as the Super League faced off with the NRL,” Hetherington said.
“The creditability of the current fixture is growing, you can see this by the sides the Australian teams are putting out. Both Melbourne and Manly put out full strength teams when we played them over the past two years, and we think this expanded format would be a tremendous success and create huge interest.”
Hetherington’s plan would have the two third placed sides play each other on the Friday night, the runner’s up on the Saturday and the respective champions on the Sunday.
It’s a proposal he put to a number of NRL clubs when he recently visited and received support from no fewer than six clubs, all who felt it would be commercially successful.
The same plan will be put to the English club at the Super League annual conference next year, and the search will be on for a viable promoter.
So we look to be on to something. So what about taking on the Storm in Melbourne?
Not so fast. The Storm will play Leeds at Elland Rd with a provisional date set down on the third week of February.
The Storm are almost certain to play a warm up game prior to that match elsewhere in the UK again. But Hetherington was unsure whether the Harlequins would again be holding the London Rugby League Challenge, as they did last year.
So some positive work in the pipeline, which is a nice alternative to usual pipe dream which these things usually are for rugby league fans.
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