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Today rugby league and heavy metal tragic Steve Mascord penned an article explaining why he’s “brushing the rugby league Test.”
But reading his article I just found myself disagreeing with it on the most fundamental levels. I love Mascord’s work, but his central thesis that the NRL is who we should be focussing our anger on for the weakness of International rugby league is just wrong; we should be mad at the RFL instead.
In his article Mascord explains how the NRL’s “complete rejection of the notion they are responsible for any national team bar the Australians leaves a bad taste in [his] mouth” and contends that “[t]he way to ‘make Test football great again’ is to fast-track other countries to competitiveness, not to assemble a team that will whoop the Kiwis’ asses.
Mascord’s ideals are noble, but I think his analysis is ultimately failing to grasp simple economic realities and what really drives interest in big event matches in any sport. At the heart his claims is a notion that has been floating around these pages and in the media for the past week or so; namely that Semi Radradra’s selection for Australia is indicative of the malaise that international rugby league finds itself in.
As someone who enjoys rugby union as much as rugby league I found this one just plain ridiculous given the almost entirely opposite reaction of me and my fellow Wallabies fans to the prospect of us being able to select Henry Speight, a brilliant Fijian winger who’s eligibility we all waited excitedly for while he accrued the necessary 36 consecutive months’ residency criteria demanded by the then IRB’s eligibility rules.
But the very similar notion of Semi playing for Australia in rugby league seems to have sent people into an absolute frenzy of incredulity and criticism of international league in general.
So why this apparent disconnect? It’s simple; in Union the interest is held by the matches between a relatively small pool of big rivals, and each union is happy to get whatever advantage they can just to be competitive with their other big rivals. It doesn’t matter that a guy like Speight isn’t playing for Fiji – he’s been here a few years and he’s going to help us beat the Boks and give us hope against the All Blacks, so who cares if he’s not quite as Australian as ACDC.
To put it simply, the trouble with international rugby league isn’t that the NRL looks after its own backyard first and doesn’t place international development ahead of its own interests, it’s that we even expect them to.
What I really mean by that I that if the RFL in England had done a better job managing and growing the Super League over the past 20 years so that it had developed a fair following beyond the M62, then England would be a much more competitive force and we’d actually care when we beat them.
But unlike the NRL (or AFL), the RFL is failing as an organisation. While the NRL has a sustainable presence in our second largest market of Melbourne and patient growth strategy for other cities, the RFL have a litany of failed experiments beyond its heartlands and recently contracted from 14 teams to 12.
It has failed to recognise where it should target growth and the importance of long-term planning in general.
With the country’s largest single market by far, you’d think that a London presence would be a priority in the way a Sydney and Melbourne presence has been for Australian Football competitions, but what limited southern presence the RFL have had in the past has been left to be haphazardly and incoherently organised by football club Fulham FC, then Brisbane Broncos in Australia, and later through tie ups with the Harlequins Rugby Union club.
When I talk to English people about the failure of League’s London ventures they often just palm it off as being because rugby league “isn’t the right fit” for London, which they explain is singularly obsessed with the EPL which leaves only enough appetite for a side order of rugby.
But that is nonsense; there are 8 million people living in London and the tastes of the market are diverse enough that the NFL are already planning for a permanent NFL franchise after years of preparing the ground with event matches there.
Sure, the NFL is an absolute behemoth that rakes in so much money it’d make even an EPL fan’s eyes water, but if you’d told a Londoner 20 years ago that there’d one day be a big American Football team in London they’d likely have laughed at you before dismissing American Football as a stupid game.
The incremental NFL approach is one the NRL is taking to heart, using a similar strategy of exposure through taking games and building fanfare to develop interest in the competition and prepare the ground for a permanent presence in the Perth market. The AFL certainly isn’t a bad case study either; with their patient and long term Sydney plan seeing the Swans develop an impressive presence in one of the world’s most crowded football markets.
But in England people are just happy to make excuses for the Super League’s limited scope and inability to crack a market that a foreign football code most English people claim to hate has slowly developed a following in.
To me, this absolute failure of the RFL in London ultimately more indicative of the problem with international rugby league than Australia wanting to pick a talented Fijian who has plied his trade in the NRL for a few years. The RFL’s lack of vision, poor structure and questionable investments has relegated rugby league in England to an ever diminishing slice of the sporting pie in the very country it was born in.
This matters for international rugby league more than the odd edibility controversy over a player from a poorer and smaller market because it denies rugby league its largest potential rivalry and therefore its largest potential EVENT.
We need to care about our opposition and enjoy beating them, and while we’re developing a great rivalry with the Kiwis, traditionally there’s no team we enjoy beating more than the Poms. But it’s hard to get too pumped up about beating even England when they’re a team whose last series win against Australia was in 1970. And I’m sorry Steve, but that just isn’t the NRL’s fault, it’s the RFL’s.
So forgive me if I’ll be tuning into watch the Test match tonight, because I for one think we shouldn’t punish the success of the NRL by blaming it for the challenges the international game faces more broadly.
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