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And so to the big business end of this crackerjack Rugby League World Cup and a huge weekend of quarter-final action-Jackson looms. Can you feel the excitement?
Chances are you cannot, given Mile Jedinak’s three-some and the gays finally getting something after having had a hell of a time, and all the other myriad things which have occupied much of our popular news cycle of late.
As lamented last week, it’s been a World Cup which has featured really good and attractive and entertaining games of greatest game of all, rugby league, but which has enjoyed less publicity than Donald Trump saying something really stupid.
And so! Tonight, game one, and it’s the country of Australia – population 25 million, registered ruby league players 466,182 – versus the island nation of Samoa, population 196,440, registered rugby league players 154.
Actually, I don’t know how many rugby league players there are in Samoa because it doesn’t say on the internet, but there are many people who are Samoan who play rugby league somewhere else other than Samoa, and they’re all very capable of very denting your sternum.
And good luck to them, and if you can get better than 33/1 in this fixture you should still not take it because Australia is going to win, there is less certainty on tomorrow’s dawn.
Australia’s price is a nominal $1.01, which means if you have a hundred large you could turn it into a hundred-and-one a bit more large, and beat the bookies thus by taking a thousand off them.
Anyway, Australia will beat Samoa who didn’t actually ‘win’ any of their three pool games, their best result a 14-all draw with Scotland in Cairns. Which is pretty good for Samoa. They probably didn’t count on that, not having a win but advancing into the quarters.
Meanwhile, and there’s been surprisingly little press about this, but the fine country of Ireland won two games out of three – which is pretty good given there are only three teams in their group, and they’re one of them – and did not make the quarter-finals.
And I invite you to riddle me that, Rugby League International Federation, from your high-rent subterranean office bunker in Fitzrovia there, what the who? How come it? Do they speak English in What?
Don’t answer that.
But you’ve got four groups, and Group C and Group D are sort of combined, and if you have 14 teams in a comp the draw will toss up these anomalies and y’know … I’m sure there would’ve been reasons and I’m sure you’re doing your best, but….
But you couldn’t squeeze in the Cook Islands? Dig up some Wolfpack People and get Canada in? Then have four groups of four? Top two go through?
People have been doing things thus for a bit.
Just a thought.
Ireland were eliminated despite winning two of their three matches. (NRLPhotos/Scott Davis)
And so! Game two and it’s the excellent Kingdom of Tonga ($1.02) taking on the hotch-potch band of feisty rebels representing Lebanon ($12), quite how bookmakers formulate these numbers is a dark art of mathematics, and not designed with the punter in mind.
Fact.
Anyway, Tonga is going to beat Lebanon in the quarter-final, and you could put a hundred thousand on it and walk off with two, there is nothing more certain outside the dawn after tomorrow’s dawn.
Fact.
Game three? New Zealand versus Fiji, which will be brilliant for the pre-match spiritual hymn of the Fijian Bati (loosely “Bodyguards”) and the thrusting vein-popping challenge of the Kiwis’ haka.
This is the stuff that makes World Cups, and all the cynical smart-arsery of the preceding fifteen paragraphs can make icky rough love with itself in the black nothingness of the digital nether-world when tears are streaming down Kevin Naiqama’s cheeks and Martin Taupau’s muscles are busting out of his tight black pants.
That stuff is magnificent.
And when they do get it on, on the park, it should be really quite good.
Fiji have some super players. We know of Jarryd “Train-Plane” Hayne, of course, that cat can rip off more funk than sex-machine James Brown.
Whether he will – or indeed whether he even can anymore – is a question that even our Jarryd, 29, may not be able to answer. Time waits for no man, except Sir David Attenborough who’s still out there in the Amazon even as we speak, upwards of 136 years old.
Elsewhere Fiji sport a super-flier in Suliasi Vunivalu who’ll scorch athletically down his wing and leap into the air, and plant the pill in hands like yabbie traps, the man is a marvel of human movement.
But the Kiwis should win. On paper, on the field, in the battle of the scariest pre-match war-dance.
But my … they lost to Tonga. They’re upset their captain, Jesse Bromwich, isn’t allowed to play. There’ll be five New Zealand Warriors in their XVII. I would not back them with money I found in the wallet of a long-dead pimp.
But it should be a cracking game of footer.
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And so, to round out the weekend, the crackerjack country of Papua New Guinea (national sport rugby league, they love it more than Trump loves himself) versus the crackerjack country of England, which manages to be a country in its own right despite being part of another country as represented by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which is the sovereign nation that competes in the Olympics and which issues passports and has a prime minister and a seat in the security council of our dear sweet United Nations.
And so on.
The game? It’ll be really good, too. Because it will feature that hoariest of all international rugby league chestnuts – the contest.
The first two quarter-finals are over. Cactus. David Goneski. They are. Australia will beat Samoa 70-6 and Tonga will beat Lebanon 40-4. Put it in the books.
But the match on Saturday and the match on Sunday feature underdogs that could just up and bite the big dogs on the bottom.
Let’s hope they do.
Particularly Papua New Guinea. That would be magnificent. They have a winger, Gary Lo, he’s like … remember that old cartoon, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe? It wasn’t that great. Bit preachy. You had to learn lessons at the end.
We used to go over to Tim McCreath’s house after school and try to guess what lesson it’d be after each show, and then we’d go and play touch footy. Dinkum did that for four years of high school.
Anyway, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe had a stubby, thick-shouldered character called “Ram Man” who would shoot his shoulders into the solar-plexuses of many a baddie.
And if you were running casting sessions in a movie of the cartoon you could do worse than Kumuls winger Gary Lo on for audition.
Word is Lo’s off to Castleford Tigers but he’d be a great fit onto the wing for the Canberra Raiders if they move Jordan Rapana or Nick Cotric to fullback and Jack Wighton to … That’s going nowhere.
And nor is this.
And bye for now.