Do Queensland Country represent country Queensland?

Brisbane City and Queensland Country face off in the first Queensland derby of the NRC on Sunday at Ballymore.

Both sides contain a host of Queensland Reds and club teammates, which should make this a ferociously competitive encounter at the spiritual home of Queensland rugby.

Announced on Wednesday, the two teams will also compete for the Andy Purcell Cup, an added incentive to a match that shouldn’t disappoint.

The fixture will rekindle memories of historic City veers Country games that have been absent since the advent of professionalism in 1996. However, marketing this match as City versus Country does not sit easily with all fans.

The naming of the Queensland Country team has come in for a bit of flack, with a few fans and commentators questioning the validity of the alignment with the ‘Country’ moniker.

I believe there are a couple of issues and misconceptions that need discussing and correcting regarding the brand of this Queensland Country side. Fundamentally however, I believe things aren’t quite as bad as they are being made out to be.

With a bit of tweaking, this team could help marry traditional country rugby with the professional game in the cities.

The primary criticism that I regularly come across is the lack of country players playing for the team. I think this is a slight misconception based around the fact that all the squad members play their club rugby in the Brisbane-based Hospital Cup.

This is fairly reasonable as, up until last year, this was the highest level of rugby below Super Rugby. Any player trying to break into the Reds would have to play at this level.

According to the redsrugby.com.au profiles of the original 35 squad members, 9 players were born in country Queensland and 17 have played in the country system, either at schoolboy level or club representative level.

Furthermore, five players previously represented the Queensland Country Heelers (Blake Enever (Colts), Ryan Freney, Rubin Fuimaono, Haydn Hirsimaki and Mitch King) and two of these players played for the Combined NSW-Queensland Country side that took on the British Lions last year (Enever and Hirsimaki).

This doesn’t seem too bad to me. As a comparison, the NSW Country Eagles have nearly half their squad listed as being from country towns, so the composition of the two country sides in the NRC is fairly similar.

So despite Queensland Country not being an origin representative side, there are a fairly decent proportion of players who identify as being from the country who are plying their trade in the team. These players are not always easily identifiable as country players because the vast majority of them are no longer country based.

In the professional era, players who do show talent in the country inevitably move to the city to take up scholarships for rugby schools. This is not always the case. Warwick-born Greg Holmes played his schoolboy rugby at Downslands College in Toowoomba for example, but the case of talented number 8 Lolo Fakaosilea is perhaps more typical.

Fakaosilea moved to Emerald from New Zealand as a boy, and had to travel two hours every weekend to play in the Central Highlands competition in Rockhampton. He was spotted playing for the Central Queensland Bushrangers in the Queensland Junior rugby union State Championships, where he was offered a scholarship to attend school in Brisbane, where his rugby has taken him to the Sunnybank Dragons and now the NRC.

This is the pathway that the country unions provide, and with the advent of a professional country team in the NRC and a little time, these avenues could seem more tangible for country players.

The second most common criticism of the Queensland Country team that I have read is where they have played. They played their first home game at Bond University on the Gold Coast, along with the naming sponsorship agreement has led some people to assume that the team are based there.

This has not proven especially popular on message boards, with fans claiming this is a Gold Coast side dressed up as a country team.

However, the team are actually based with Brisbane City at Ballymore. The team have only played one of their games at Bond University and this is mainly due to financial assistance being offered to the Queensland Rugby Union by Bond University.

Granted, of the four home games Country will play this season, the first two were on the Gold Coast (including the curtain raiser for the Argentina Test). The remaining fixtures took place at Ballymore last week, and will take place in Townsville on the 11th of October.

For me, the only unusual choice was to host the Rams game at Ballymore. Brisbane is not a country city and if anyone can let me know why Ballymore was chosen, I’d love to hear the reasoning.

I would suggest playing the match at the Toowoomba Sports Ground as a much better alternative. There is a capacity of around 9,000 (2,300 seated in the undercover grandstand ), the floodlights are up to NRL standard.

More importantly, it would be the only game to take place in the birthplace of Queensland Country rugby union, the Darling Downs.

In the match program for the Rams game, coach Steve Meehan talks up the opportunity for his players to “compete for the first time at the spiritual home of Queensland Rugby.”

How much better would the feeling have been for Country fans to see the team that has been marketed as theirs, play at the spiritual home of Country Rugby I wonder?

The NSW Country Eagles have taken three of their four games out to country NSW. Lismore, Orange and Dubbo is a good spread around the state, and the Queensland rugby union would do well to learn from this and take games to Toowoomba and the Sunshine Coast as well as Townsville next year.

That would be the best way to engage the country rugby community and encourage more support at matches.

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend the game on Sunday as I will be in country Queensland. As the game is not being shown on TV, I worry that an opportunity is being missed by the NRC organisers to spread the word.

This is a high profile game, and in theory should be cause for rugby clubs across the state to throw open their doors and have the game on the big screen. Unfortunately, despite all the positives surrounding this match, I imagine I would be able to count on one hand the number of people who will be watching it in the regions that the Queensland Rugby Union should be targeting and that is disappointing.