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My 2019 NRL wishlist

16th October, 2018
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16th October, 2018
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As season 2018 disappears further into the rearview it’s time to look ahead.

There are a lot of ways rugby league and the NRL could improve next year – on and off the field. I want to indulge in some ‘perfect world’ dreaming.

Are these wishes fanciful? Certainly. That’s the nature of a wish. Are they unlikely? Definitely. Are they deadly serious? Of course not. But that won’t stop me putting them out there into the world, floating along like a dandelion seed before lodging in a fertile place and flourishing.

Here’s my wishlist for 2019. In a perfect world, they’d all get done. What’s yours?

Halfway decent media coverage
We’ve become accustomed to rugby league being the mainstream media’s whipping boy but it’s not a stretch to say 2018 was the worst on record for quality of coverage.

The debacle of 2018 was fittingly capped this week with the sensational tale of ‘the Australian men’s and women’s teams bought all the food on the Waiheke Island ferry so the bar had to close’.

With the players behaving themselves until Mad Monday and seemingly no media interest or capability in producing analysis of what happened on the field, we had to put up with manufactured crisis after manufactured crisis.

I’m willing to write off 2018 as an aberration, overreach from certain quarters desperately looking to generate clicks and interest in ‘scandals’ when there really weren’t any.

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My wish for 2019 is four words: less agendas, more love. For a group of people claiming to love rugby league, the actions of the big names in the NRL media continually demonstrate the opposite.

I especially hope someone somewhere in Fox NRL headquarters is looking in a mirror thinking “maybe we can get more viewers by not infecting our usually quality programming with staged slanging matches and crisis peddlers pushing rumours they got from NRL reddit”. But I doubt it.

I used to watch Fox’s NRL shows religiously. Now I don’t.

Cooper Cronk sings

Cooper Cronk. A good news story. (AAP Image/Craig Golding)

A proper trade period
You might be getting sick of reading this from me, but I’ll say it again: I love players being able to move teams. There should be more and more of it.

The average NRL career is around 48 games, barely two seasons. Even that rare player who squeezes 15 years out of their body later has to transition into the real world and make a living for another 30-odd working years.

So I can’t understand why anyone would want to stand in the way of a player making the most of the limited time they have playing rugby league.

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Johnathan Thurston

JT is one recent retiree. (Photo by Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images)

My wish is so simple most of it could be done overnight: any player can move to any team at any time until June 30. And long as the receiving club has the salary space to get them, they leave as soon as the papers are approved.

Let teams ‘officially’ trade players during a two-week trade period at the end of the year. Let teams buy out a player’s contract (within the cap) if they want them badly. If a player has the means, let him or her buy out their own contract to become a free agent.

Reform the player agent accreditation system. Oh, and publish third-party payments. That’s pretty important for this to work.

Like I said, simple.

A genuine, supported push into the USA
I’ve written before about how rugby league should be planning to attack the United States market. It’s a no-brainer to promote the game and get a foothold, however small, in the world’s biggest sports market.

The Denver Test this season worked well on the field but was a debacle off it, with the promoter not paying the teams and a stack of vested interests leading a campaign against the game from day one.

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The 2025 World Cup is supposed to be in the USA but already people are writing it off rather than trying to make sure it’s the best possible advertisement for the sport.

Rugby league is the perfect sport for the USA. Major physical contact, lots of action, plenty of advertising opportunities in a perfect television product.

Literally thousands of ready-made athletes come out of the college systems every year and hundreds leave NFL teams every year. At the very least I’d want my club sending someone over there to size up a few possible recruits.

Play an NRL match, play an international game, hold a talent camp for prospective players. Just get something going. And guess what? It’ll probably cost money. Money that will come back hundred-fold if you get things right.

The game needs to move beyond Australia, New Zealand, England and the Pacific Islands, and the opportunity to make noise in the USA is massive.

My wish for 2019 is that the pissing contest between small-minded patch defenders doesn’t win out again.

Joshua Rice USA Rugby League World Cup 2017

Joshua Rice of USA at the 2017 Rugby League World Cup. (NRLPhotos/Scott Davis)

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Better match analysis before, during and after games
Channel Nine’s NRL match coverage runs thusly: spend three minutes introducing the teams, spend 80 minutes bagging the refs, give the man of the match award to the winning team’s halfback, bag the refs some more, then go home.

Fans want more and fans deserve more. There’s so much strategy and on-the-fly adjustments happening in a game of rugby league but TV watchers wouldn’t know because it’s never explained to them.

A few weeks ago, Matthew Johns did a short piece breaking down halfback play and people are still talking about it. That’s how rare it is to have it explained how a position should be played, how a set play worked, how teams develop and adjust their match tactics for their opposition.

The game needs to open up. My wish for 2019 is that someone out there realises that there’s a huge thirst for data, analytics, decent statistics (because the NRL’s official offering is absolutely disgusting) and sets about expanding our minds about rugby league.

Channel 9 commentators Andrew Johns and Brad Fittler talking.

Channel 9 commentators Andrew Johns and Brad Fittler. (Photo by Mark Kolbe/Getty Images)

No blue stripes on the Raiders jersey
It’s a well-held belief in fashion circles that ‘blue and green should never be seen’ and I’m 100 per cent on board with that. The Raiders are the Green Machine. Not the Green and Blue Stripes Machine.

Nick Cotric of the Canberra Raiders

Nick Cotric of the Raiders, in green – and blue. (Photo by Hannah Peters/Getty Images)

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I want my men creating fear and discomfort in the hearts of their opponent and I want them doing so wearing a proper green jersey (sponsor logos don’t count, but, for the record, I’d make them shades of green too).

I hear you now – great, another Canberra whinger who wants to blame everything but the team for the NRL’s second-longest premiership drought. I get that. But there’s hard data to support the curse of the blue stripes.

In their last fully green jersey, the Raiders went 37-34 in three seasons including the 2016 run to the preliminary final. That’s not a massive winning percentage, but us fans will take any positive winning percentage.

With the blue stripes added, they’re 21-27 in two seasons and they look lost, listless, unable to hold leads or fight back when they’re in a hole.

My wish for 2019 is the only solution – get rid of the blue and fill it with green again. You’ll see the difference!

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