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The Parramatta Eels will play against the Canterbury Bankstown Bulldogs in Round 10 on Friday night, and as an Eels supporter and a general fan of rugby league, this is an issue.
The first and most obvious issue is that this is one match on the NRL calendar that Eels fans crave above all and it can and should be used to open the first four rounds of the season. To kickstart the year you want the fans to be passionate and driven; rivalries should be the major selling piece in achieving this passion and drive.
Yes, an argument could be made for making supporters wait for such rivalries, it could create a want and desire for the games ahead which could be true, until you break down the draw and realise you play most teams twice in a season and you can have the best of both worlds because the rematch is on the horizon.
This brings me to the second issue: too much of a good thing is a bad thing. We were lucky to see one of the other great rivalries in the match against the Penrith Panthers in Round 1’s battle of the west, but we also saw a repeat of this rivalry four weeks later. We also met the Sea Eagles in the second game of the year only to play them again five weeks later.
In fact after ten rounds of NRL the Bulldogs will be the sixth team Parramatta has played in the opening ten weeks – the Canberra Raiders are the only other of these teams that will have played once, and they only play them once this year.
(AAP Image/Craig Golding)
With two matches each against the Sea Eagles, Tigers, Panthers and Sharks, where is the balance and where is the desire when the opening nine rounds are like Groundhog Day?
The game is becoming stale, and the solution is to try something new and fresh. An idea suggested by Parramatta CEO Bernie Gurr is to break the competition into two eight-team conferences. Each conference plays within themselves once, amounting to seven matches opening the year. Then they combine to play teams from the other conference, amounting to eight matches.
By Round 15 everyone has played each other once, and we then finish of the year playing the second round of the conference, amounting to another seven matches, finishing up with a 22-match competition.
East versus west, north versus south – there probably isn’t a perfect mix, but neither is the current format. A major positive to the reduced competition is that it opens the door for all representative games to be standalone on weekends, and with the rise of the Pacific nations and the women’s game, this doesn’t need to be only Origin and the Anzac test.
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On a final note, the topic of expansion is always in the media, and the NRL seems to have no real model to achieve this. Maybe instead of procrastinating they should look at a second-tier competition, with the grand finalists from the new competition replacing 15th and 16th-placeed teams in the first-tier competition.
Open the market, expand to the Pacific nations and to regional areas of Australia, bring back Newtown, Western Suburbs and the Bears.
Lastly, control the salary cap and remove the grey area of third-party deals. Make player salaries public and transparent.
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