- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
“The geek shall inherit the Earth” has been a good expression for the idea that trainspotters and anoraks will make the really big decisions in future because they are mostly smarter than everyone else.
This prediction has always applied to rugby league.
When the dinosaurs of the old Sydney Premiership die out, they won’t be replaced. Instead, younger, more outward-looking people will take their place and attitudes which were hitherto considered fanciful will gain widespread acceptance,
Did you ever think you’d hear Phil Gould calling for a shorter club season? Or Trent Robinson for that matter? He suggested 20 rounds in the NRL as a way to clean up scheduling.
Wayne Bennett says rugby league “won’t have a product” in 20 years unless it gets on the globalisation train. These options have been expressed for a long time but always seemed extreme and even traitorous.
Now they are quite reasonable things to say.
[latest_videos_strip category=”rugby-league” name=”League”]
Reporters are the same. The older guys who saw rugby league as a Sydney sport which they could dominate as long as it stayed a Sydney sport are being replaced by a younger brigade that follows big overseas competitions and wants to see rugby league up there alongside them.
For the first ten years of its existence, the RLIF wasn’t even called by its correct name in the Australian media. Now it seems to be talked about as a serious organisation almost every day there.
Not too many new reporters coming into Australian rugby league don’t care about international competition, or exhibition matches in new territories, or expansion – the benefits are obvious to them because these people are products of a connected world.
Rugby league has underachieved so spectacularly over the past 123 years that it seemed reasonable to suggested it would always be thus, that the proletariat would always put its own interests ahead of those of the sport out of sheer necessity to put food on the table.
But maybe that is not set in stone. Maybe the necessary culture change is happening.
Outside interests are derided within the NRL but without Duco Events, there would be no Auckland Nines. Without Jason Moore, we wouldn’t be taking the World Cup to America in 2025.
The NRL and its clubs need to appreciate that while they don’t – or think they don’t – need outside the promoters, the sport as a whole desperately needs them if it is to grow. Live and let live, folks. When players are on international duty, they’re not your IP anymore.
The arc of rugby league history is long – but it may just bend towards progress after all.