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Opinion

League and rugby will always hate each other but code-hopping anger dying out

7th February, 2022
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7th February, 2022
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Roger Tuivasa-Sheck is a rugby league icon in New Zealand, captain of the Warriors and long-term Kiwi representative who has jumped ship to rugby.

His switch to pursue a chance at representing the All Blacks in the 2023 World Cup is the kind of “shock defection” between the codes which used to get the club officials, media and fans up in arms.

However, there has been barely any will towards RTS since he announced his decision last January.

A couple of decades ago at the height of rugby’s raids on the NRL ranks, a Dally M Medal winner leaving the code for the bitter 15-player rivals would have been cause for the outrage brigade to point to the sky and be adamant it was falling in.

There have been some talented rugby players heading the other way too in the off-season, although not as high-profile as the 28-year-old former Warriors fullback.

Rugby sevens duo Lachlan Miller, who has joined Cronulla, and Kiwi Olympic silver medallist Will Warbrick, a Melbourne Storm recruit, are trying to break into the NRL in 2022.

The women’s rugby teams have been awash with cross-code players in recent years with Charlotte Caslick, Ellia Green and Evania Pelite among many who have had a foot in each camp.

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Is it possible that the rugby codes have matured to an extent where professional athletes switching between one and the other is no longer cause for five-alarm fire bells to ring?

League raided rugby’s ranks for decades since the great split in the late 1800s in the UK and from 1908 in Australia. By the 1980s, league’s chequebooks were winning the battle for the best talent more than ever with former Wallabies Ray Price and Michael O’Connor and ex-schoolboy star Wally Lewis dominating the professional code’s landscape while rugby defiantly hung onto its amateur status.

When rugby turned professional in the mid 1990s it didn’t take long for the empire to strike back in the star wars – when the likes of Wendell Sailor, Mat Rogers and Lote Tuiqiri were lured to union around the turn of the century, the NRL community was crying foul, conveniently overlooking the fact that league had been stealing talent from its rival code for generations.

Long-time administrator Shane Richardson, who was CEO of the Penrith Panthers in 2002, summed his response to the hysteria in typically blunt fashion when asked specifically about Tuqiri taking up a lucrative offer from what was then known as the Australian Rugby Union.

“It won’t even rate as a pimple on rugby league’s backside.”

This was an unpopular belief at the time but it has rung true. For those who remember the awesome sight of Tuqiri in his prime will recall he was the living embodiment of the modern winger – a towering physical specimen with the speed and power to put fear in opposing forwards as well as the backs.

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When future Immortal Andrew Johns flirted with a possible switch to rugby, it was a monumental moment for both codes.

In a memorably intense appearance on the NRL Footy Show one Thursday night in 2004, sitting alongside his brother Matthew who was a co-host, Johns was supposed to reveal whether he would become a Waratah in the hope of becoming a dual international or stick with the Newcastle Knights.

He squirmed in the live TV spotlight, genuinely unsure of which way to go and ultimately told the panel and the fan bases hanging on his every word “I don’t know what I’m going to do”.

After a late-night heart to heart with his brother away from the cameras, the 30-year-old halfback stuck with league to finish out his career which was unfortunately cut short by neck surgery in 2007.

The stakes were so much higher then. If “Joey” had made the switch, he could have been a revelation or perhaps he could have struggled to adapt like Benji Marshall in his brief foray with the Auckland Blues in 2014, but Johns would have given rugby an enormous amount of publicity which could have dramatically changed the sport’s trajectory in Australia, which has been trending downwards on several fronts over the past decade in particular.

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St George Illawarra centre Mark Gasnier was another leaguie who made a contentious switch to rugby but after rejecting an ARU multimillion-dollar bid in 2006, his move was more about escaping the media spotlight in Sydney, heading to France for a two-year club stint in 2008 before returning to be part of the Dragons’ 2010 premiership victory.

Of course the player who has caused the most friction between the rugby codes in the Antipodes in modern times has been Sonny Bill Williams.

After an absolute firestorm when he walked out on Canterbury to play rugby in France and eventually become an All Black, he managed to make a transition back to the NRL to be part of the Roosters’ 2013 grand final triumph, return to the rugby in his homeland and finish his football career with a brief five-game stint at the Tricolours two years ago.

Being able to have four stints, which included 58 Tests for the All Blacks, either side of the Tasman in the varying codes is only possible if you have SBW’s superb talent. Don’t expect that to become the norm.

However, the two-way flow of talent will only become more and more commonplace, particularly for players who grew up with one version before trying another, like Suliasi Vunivalu, Tepai Moeroa, Marika Koroibete, Semi Radradra have bounced back and forth in recent years.

The Wallabies would love to see former schoolboy rugby prodigies like Angus Crichton and Cameron Murray do likewise. Murray is contracted to the Rabbitohs until the end of 2025 but Crichton is off contract at the Roosters at the end of this year.

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It’d be much better for Rugby Australia to throw its limited resources at players like that rather than Israel Folau and Karmichael Hunt who seemed to be driven by the pursuit of fame and fortune rather than the Wallabies tradition.

In the case of the latest high-profile code hopper, Tuivasa-Sheck recently said he feels like a rookie messing up as he learns the intricacies of rugby despite playing extensively as a teenager before hitting the big time in the NRL.

Such is the respect he commands from the Warriors, they were magnanimous in allowing him to leave his contract early and have done nothing but wish him well.

Perhaps they are hoping history repeats because Rogers, Tuqiri, Sailor, Gasnier, SBW all eventually returned to the NRL.

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