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One of the biggest misconceptions in South African sport is that rugby union is as big in Australia as it is in the Republic. After having regularly visited The Roar over the past five months or so, avidly reading many of the articles posted both by the experts and the crowd, the nature of the inaccuracy of this conception has become strikingly clear to me.
Only the keenest of rugby followers in South Africa would know that rugby is a dwarfed by other sports in Australia, but, as I myself once thought, most (if not all) of these keen observers would assume that Aussie Rules and cricket are the more fancied codes.
Almost none, however, would think that it is rugby league, along with Aussie rules, that overshadows union so convincingly.
Indeed, if one were to ask most South Africans what rugby league is, they’d think you’re talking about good old rugby, wondering why you’ve added the ‘league’ suffix.
If I were to put a statistic to it, I’d probably say that only one in twelve ‘Saffas’ (and I think even that is an optimistic estimate) would have heard of, or watched a game of League, let alone played it. And those that have played it would probably have only done so whilst practicing union, which was how I first became aware of the code’s existence.
And when I did play it, I assumed that it was nothing more than a variant of union; in the way that Sevens is.
It’s only been through these past couple of months of research and an awful lot of reading The Roar that I’ve realized that League exists completely separately from union.
At first, it was completely unfathomable that these two codes, although different in various ways, could claim to be completely disparate from one another when these distinguishing aspects are seemingly so subtle. To see if I was being unreasonable, I played a couple of rugby league highlights clips that I’d found on You Tube to some friends of mine that are completely un-inclined to sports.
Naturally, they just thought that they were watching rugby, only inquiring why instead of seeing the piles of bodies resulting after a player had been tackled to ground as they were accustomed to, the player rather stood up again and rolled the ball through his legs.
For a long while I was annoyed that league exists so independently of union, and wished that the ‘Great Schism’ of the nineteenth century had never happened.
This sentiment became even more potent as I became more familiarized with some of the league stars like Thurston, Inglis, Slater, and of course Lockyer, wondering how much these guys could have added to the already red hot talent in world rugby.
But after having read more and more of the ‘code wars’ that seem to spring up whenever league and union are mentioned in the same article on this site, and having watched more and more of league on YouTube (which is sort of my only means of watching it because it isn’t really televised here in South Africa) and found that I enjoyed it just as much as union, I quickly realized that there’s no point in wishing for things that can’t be be undone, and decided that I certainly wasn’t going to be one of those to shout stupidly “my code is better than yours”.
Nowadays I find myself wondering ‘ what if league was more prominent in South Africa?’ The obvious answer would seemingly be that the sport wouldn’t catch on any more than it did in the sixties, when the English and the French attempted to spread the league ‘gospel’ amongst the ‘Saffa’ masses, which clearly did not work.
Of course amongst the large majority of the rugby fraternity in this country, any type of rugby without any rucks, mauls, and line outs would have little appeal, at least not in a competitive and professional capacity.
This is why many of the ELVs that deliberately nullified these contests were so vehemently protested in South Africa. I mean, could you possibly imagine league being popular in Pretoria, i.e. Blue Bulls country?
Hardly.
But the code may possibly hold an appeal amongst the people in the country that don’t have an attraction to union. One of the biggest detracting things about union is its complexity, which league’s appeal is not hampered by in the way that many would argue union’s is.
Another one of the major things that puts people off rugby in South Africa is that it is still largely associated with white bureaucracy and is still largely perceived amongst the ethnic majority as being nothing more than a sport for hulking Afrikaaner males.
League, if shown to be completely disparate from union in the way that it asserts itself as, won’t necessarily carry these historical burdens if ever it was fiercely marketed in South Africa.
The other pro is that if the South African Rhinos, the country’s national rugby league team I doubt anyone has ever heard of, were to be as strong as, say, England, I think it would also do worlds for league’s much derided global footprint.
Though I will always be a “man of the union”, so to speak, it would be nice to have a national league side that is competitive enough to realistically go toe to toe with the likes of the Kangaroos or the Kiwis.
For that matter, it would be nice to watch league played competitively and professionally in South Africa at all. I wonder if this will remain as nothing more than a pipe-dream.
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