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The coverage of the start of the rugby league season could not have been more different on the two sides of the world.
The coverage in Europe has been about Super League, of course, and the narratives around St Helens going for an unprecedented fourth championship in a row, but also a weaving of stories around who might get picked for England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and France going into the World Cup in October.
If you were watching the NRL trial on Fox League, you’d barely have known that a World Cup existed in rugby league, let alone that one is taking place at the end of this season.
It was quite impressive that they managed to (admirably) plug the NRL’s Tonga relief appeal so many times – including interviewing Felise Kaufusi carrying a Tongan flag – and not touch upon that rugby league thing a few years back where Tonga made quite the name for themselves.
It spoke (or didn’t, I suppose) to the differing peaks of the season. In Europe, the World Cup is the pinnacle, the culmination of 2022 in rugby league, the be-all and end-all.
In Australia, that’s Origin and our own domestic Grand Final in October and then we’ll sit around for months waiting for next year’s trials, watching a bit of cricket and tennis on the way.
One could suggest that, given that the World Cup will be held in England, it matters more there and there is certainly truth in that, but I doubt it would be much different if the final was in Melbourne rather than Manchester.
In Australia, the World Cup is treated as an afterthought, when it is thought of at all. After all, these were the trials that the NRL would rather see their players compete in than go to the 2021 World Cup, which in turn saw it postponed on slightly spurious Covid concerns.
At the time that would have been the middle of the tournament, Sydney was emerging from three months of lockdown and the Wallabies were playing in front of 82,000 people in London. The Covid argument put forward by the Australian Rugby League Commission, the NRL and their clubs was paper thin.
Damien Cook of Australia (Photo by Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images)
The World Cup, for Australia, is an inconvenience and a needless way in which their talent can get injured, instead of what it should be, which is the best opportunity for the sport to grow itself on a global platform.
That said, it’s not like the NRL has really managed to get its priorities in line when its own comp is concerned.
The first half of the season in the NRL is often seen as little more than an extended Origin trial in the eyes of commentators, who then have an annual ritual of appearing surprised when the league keeps going through Origin and they still have to cover NRL games.
Then, when Origin is done, they have a few weeks in deepest, darkest winter before the road to the Finals picks up.
From a marketing perspective, the idea is to build your season around what are known as tentpole events: regular moments that provide high points within the season and give you the next thing to look forward to.
For the NRL, it’s quite obvious: the kick off in March, ANZAC Day in April, Indigenous round in May, Origin in June and July, then the run-in down to the Finals. It adds an extra layer to the structure of the season that helps marketing week to week.
One would hope that the World Cup would be the culmination of this – the Aussie sporting calendar is almost completely empty in October and November, after AFL and NRL but before cricket. It’s there waiting to be claimed by someone, but there is little will.
The NRL isn’t necessarily to blame here. The Rugby League World Cup is yet to confirm an Australian broadcast partner for the 2022 tournament, so the main broadcaster Fox League, has absolutely no vested interest in talking about the tournament at all.
What should the ARLC focus on? (Photo: Fiona Goodall/Getty Images)
Even though Fox aren’t broadcasting the tournament it’s still baffling that they don’t mention it. It’s hard to imagine Optus covering the Premier League and never mentioning the FIFA World Cup, or Nine ignoring the Olympics because they’re on Seven.
Sky, the UK broadcaster, aren’t carrying the World Cup either (every game of the Men’s, Women’s and Wheelchair is free on the BBC), their coverage still holds the international tournament as the most important thing.
Alongside the commentary, each player and coach gets a flag icon by their name on the TV identifying their national team: Lachlan Coote gets a Scotland flag, while Samisoni Langi gets a Tongan flag.
It’s small but it makes a huge difference to the casual viewer, who doesn’t care that they’re both from Western Sydney.
The only time the World Cup got a mention at all in Fox League’s coverage of the NRL trials was when Greg Alexander claimed that a good season for Melbourne Storm winger Xavier Coates might get him in picked for the tournament.
Alexander, by implication, meant for Australia: Coates was born in Papua New Guinea and represented the Kumuls in 2019.
It’s easy to say it was one commentator saying one dumb thing, but Kangaroos coach Mal Meninga came out with something very similar this week, calling for the likes of Jarome Luai to declare early for Australia rather than their heritage nations.
You’ll remember that Mal came out with similar stuff during Origin last year, briefly forgetting that he’s Kangaroos coach first and Queenslander second to question Luai’s choice to play for New South Wales, saying that Origin players should be Kangaroos players “first and foremost”.
Parking for one moment that Meninga himself picked Semi Radradra, a naturalised Australian born and raised in Fiji, for his first Kangaroos squad in 2016 – there mustn’t have been any decent wingers in the NRL that season – his comments somewhat defeat the point of why the eligibility rules exist.
Luai is from Mount Druitt, so of course he can play for New South Wales, but he’s also Samoan, and therefore eligible to play for them.
“At international level you should play for your heritage,” said the Penrith star at the time. “I was brought up in the Samoan church and I owe it to my family. I want to do them proud.
“Money’s all good but I think at international level it shouldn’t be about money.”
Mal and Brandy’s comments show that, not only does Australia largely ignore international footy – the Kangaroos have played four games in five years – they also fundamentally misunderstand why it’s good and needs to be backed.
“Play for us when we want you, but we won’t play any games unless you force us to” seems to be the message.
Guys like Xavier Coates with PNG, or Jason Taumalolo with Tonga, or Jarome Luai with Samoa, know exactly what the World Cup is about.
For them, it is their chance to play for their culture and their family, to experience what athletes in every other sport in the world get to experience when they hear the national anthem fire up.
Ask any of the men and women who play in the All Stars games how they feel about it, and they don’t talk about the huge step up in quality of footy – like, perhaps, they might about Origin – but instead talk about pride, heritage and culture.
The All Stars is a sideshow bagatelle compared to the World Cup, where 16 nations are in the mix across every heritage in the NRL and Super League. It should be the pinnacle.
We should be talking every week about the red-hot competition to get into the Tonga side, what the Poms in the NRL tell us about the relative strength of England and who comes into Kangaroos contention.
Even the trials, which featured players we won’t see in first grade again this year, were replete with World Cup storylines: Peter Mamouzelos of Souths will turn out for Greece, the Laybutt brothers at the Cowboys are nailed on for PNG and Dom Young, who scored for Newcastle, will be a superstar for Jamaica.
Instead, it’s NRL business as usual. First and foremost. Above everything else. To the exclusion of everything else.