All signs point to a golden era for rugby league

A number of interesting things have happened in rugby league over the past few years. In isolation, they are inconsequential, but looked at together, they suggest rugby league is about to enter a wonderful period for the game.

Far too often you don’t recognise a golden era until the time has passed. I grew up just assuming that the Wallabies would beat the All Blacks in the final minutes of the Bledisloe Cup and win the World Cup every eight years.

But I plan to savour every minute of the upcoming golden era in rugby league. The signs could not be any clearer. Here are a number of the early indicators, and what they mean.

1. September 2009 – Bulldogs v Parramatta draw 75,000 to a semi-final.
The telling point? Over thirty thousand opposition fans came to a Bulldogs game.

For a long time a rugby league game was a rough place to be, especially when it featured the Bulldogs. As little as ten years ago the club was shambolic, beset by the salary cap cheating scandal, the sexual assault case at Port Macquarie, and a core group of fans whose conduct at the game steered many opposing fans away.

Flash forward and thanks to a regime change driven by Todd Greenburg, the Bulldogs are thriving and fans are happy to come to their games. This is the case across the league, as rugby league crowds have grown up, making the games a much safer place to be and far more attractive to young families.

As tickets become more affordable with membership packages, and word of mouth grows, crowds will get stronger.

2. September 2010 – Joel Monaghan abuses a dog.
The telling point? No one in the game tried to pretend it was anything but the problem of the player involved.

Coinciding with the Bulldogs’ bad patch, the spotlight was shone brightly on the dodgy conduct of many league players in their daily lives. Assaults, drunken antics, police charges – it was a continual rogues gallery.

By the time Joel Monaghan disgraced himself, the rugby league community had stopped making excuses for players, given up on denying the problem, abandoned faux outrage, stopped pretending it didn’t exist, stopped blaming the media and trying to cover it up. They finally accepted that if a player stepped out of line, he only have himself to blame.

Every time the officials, media and general community were slow to condemn the players that acted up, their problems became a rugby league problem, a brickbat to belt the reputation of the sport.

The message given to the players was very clear: anything you do at any time is fair game for the press and public consumption, and if you stuff up, it is entirely your fault and you will wear the consequences.

This message has got through and other than embarrassing repeat offenders like Carney and Lui, the players have stopped disgracing themselves in public. Ironically the sport with the worst offenders of all is now doing the right thing to help the players mature. The fans driven from the game will slowly trickle back.

3. October 2011 – Will Hopoate signs with the Parramatta Eels.
The telling point? They gave a fifth of their salary cap to an outside back.

For the last decade, the salary cap has been very tight. This has proven enormously frustrating to fans who watch their winning team torn apart in the ensuring year, and to the players and clubs as well. Even more worrying has been the number of players who have left the NRL full stop to chase the money in Super Rugby. But there are clearly some significant changes ahead.

No sane CEO and coach would give one fifth of their salary cap to an outside back, someone who may only touch the ball every second or third set. The big money always goes to players closer to the action.

The salary negotiated for Hopoate for season 2014 indicates clearly that Parramatta does not expect $800,000 to be one fifth of the salary cap by then. Clubs that can afford to are making deals in the expectation that the salary cap is about to increase significantly. Look at the money being offered to Sonny Bill Williams at the Roosters, or the Wests Tigers slowly building a team full of internationals.

With a higher salary cap, we can expect more star players to stay put at their current team, or at least in the NRL instead of searching for greener pastures elsewhere.

4. February 2014 – The Independent Commission takes control of the game.
The telling point? The game will be led, instead of managed.

For the past ten years, David Gallop has had a very simple brief: keep eight games of NRL on TV every weekend, and put out any fires that break out. As mentioned above, the backburning has paid off and the firefighting is becoming a lot more straightforward.

He now has the opportunity to spend some more time thinking about those eight games a week. Right now, the game is frozen, controlled by the clubs and state leagues who just want to look after their own patch, all the time hemmed in by a small-time television deal which controls scheduling.

Meanwhile, league fans have watched the AFL grow from being a funny game played by big men in little boys’ shorts to being a national monster, with huge crowds, enormous TV money, efficient management, innovative scheduling, and masses of cash.

When the Independent Commission kicks in sometime this century, league fans will finally have a body which has the best interests of the game in mind, and if it can work that well for AFL, imagine what it can do for the NRL.

5. June 2009 – Billy Slater runs through half of New South Wales to score a try.
The telling point? Attack can still beat defence.

As athletes get bigger, faster and have better endurance, there is always a risk that they will outgrow their game. This generally leads to a tightening of contests and greater defence then attack.

Defence is very important, good defence wins titles, and blah blah blah, but who are we kidding here? We want to see scoring. Fans want to watch Jarryd Hayne running in the open field, not Nathan Hindmarsh making sixty tackles. They want to see James O’Conner scoring tries, not Johnny Wilkinson slotting drop goals. They want to see Brett Holman from twenty yards, not Fabio Grosso from the spot.

When Billy Slater cut the New South Wales defence to ribbons to clinch the State of Origin in 2009, it showed that even at the highest level of the game, attack can beat defence. Not so easily that a try is scored every five minutes, but regularly enough that the quality of the game on the field is better now then at any time in the history of the sport. The sport has struck upon a great mix between attack and defence with the most talented attacking players still able to destroy the opposition and delight the fans.

When you put that all together, there is a great platform for rugby league to enter a true golden era. This is not to say that are no challenges on the horizon.

Decisions need to be made on when to expand and where: consolidating the heartland in Brisbane and the Central Coast, or into new territory in Adelaide and Perth?

The wrestling in the tackles has been contained but is still going on, the game needs to work out how much is enough. A stand also needs to be made on the insidious amount of gambling that is creeping into the sport. Did we need a new addiction so soon after breaking the cigarette sponsorship shackles?

But by far the biggest challenge for rugby league is to overcome the handicap of working with Channel 9, who not only determine the schedule, but also inflict upon the fans a tired commentary team, delayed telecasts, poor support outside New South Wales and Queensland, and tacky gambling promotion.

But every sport has issues, and rugby league’s are in no way insurmountable. I’m confident that the next ten years will be an era we will remember fondly for the rest of our lives.