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In the past, this correspondent has repeatedly extolled the virtues of rugby league as a ‘rebel sport’.
You can’t ban criticism in a game that itself was born out of discord and class struggle, right? Rugby league is a social movement as much as it’s a sport, as I’ve told you before.
All of which is well and good.
But rugby league’s combatative origins are often to its detriment, too. Only recently have its devotees taken on a missionary spirit, where its main rival has spread its tentacles through international business and diplomacy over the course of a century.
When you’re downtrodden, you’re too busy watching your back to worry about spreading the word.
Rugby league also seems especially prone to dissension. The missionaries I spoke of before don’t take long to start bickering with each other and we now have rival governing bodies in outposts as exotic as Italy and Thailand.
At its core, this has been a game about empowering the working class. And everyone wants power, don’t they?
Nothing in rugby league is accepted, off the table. You want to change the rules of the very game from one season to the next? Fine! It’s there to be tampered with because that’s what we’ve done from the very beginnings of the Northern Union.
The other aspect of rugby league’s unhealthily poor relationship with authority is the attitude to referees. It’s probably the least explored aspect, which is a pity.
But after Friday’s events at ANZ Stadium, it is probably time to rethink our pride at being a ‘rebel sport’. It’s probably time to acknowledge that feeling the need, and the right, to give it to ‘the man’ at every turn is ineffably stupid.
And when people say the NRL is losing touch with the man in the street – if that man wants shoulder charges, punch-ups and concussed players running about – then maybe rugby league can’t see the back of the man in the street quickly enough.
Maybe all of the problems listed above – the lack of geographical spread, the in-fighting, the intimidation of match officials – can be solved if the game just accepts it is going to lose a few thousand people by making a seismic cultural shift.
What if we were a sport that was not dictated to by the Sydney media? Not limited by the concerns of 16 teams in one competition? Not prone to change rules and forget traditions at the drop of a hat? Not willing to tolerate those whose moral compass is pointing permanently at the scoreboard?
Anthony O’Brien from Brothers Junior Rugby League Club in Brisbane contacted me to tell me about a program they are running with all their players called Back The Ref.
It’s a code of conduct that involves the kids remembering three principles: 1. Say “G’day Ref” 2. Accept decisions 3. Say ” Thanks for the game ref”.
The slogan is “no ref, no game”.
Brothers have taken the program to the QRL and are hoping it will spread throughout the state. They are to be congratulated.
The culture of rugby league is so aggressive, so in-the-moment, so … Sydney. We need more organisations and people like Brothers to extol the romance of the game, the winter Sundays that many of our lives have revolved around for as long as we can remember.
The AFL does it better than us. We need to remember that the sights, sounds and smells of a rugby league season stay with us long after we’ve forgotten a referee’s decision.
Sadly, so do scenes like those on Good Friday.