Archives, eh
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# P.T. Barnum's League vs Union
The Daily Telegraph today commenced an astro-turfing campaign for promoter Phil Franks’s plan to stage a game between the Australian rugby league and rugby union teams. It’s a splendid idea: it’ll sell a ton of eyeballs on the News Limited websites for the next couple of days; it’ll give Franks’s profile a bit of a buff; it’ll keep the league fans something to talk about during the off season; and it will never be spoken of again after the ARU and ARL tell the promoter to go away. It’s win-win!
Every couple of years this idea seems to crop up again. Every couple of years some promoter, some entrepreneur seems to think they can make a buck out of staging a stunt game and ending – paraphrasing the marketing – ‘ending the controversy of whose is the better code’ or ‘which is the better team’ or whatever. They are probably right, they probably could turn over a lot of money selling tickets. They are, after all, professional promoters who make a living from working out how to capture the public’s interest in one thing or another and convincing us to part with cash to see it. They are marketers: they know how to market. That’s all they know though. Promoters promote and promotion is by its very nature a short term business because once they have got you to part with your money to witness one marvel they’re already looking for the next marvel. If they have to create themselves a product in order to promote it, they aren’t aiming for a long-term business plan; no, they’ll stitch together a monkey and a fish.
There are two obvious problems with the idea. The most important stumbling block is the sporting bodies that run the two games and have the players contracted. The whole idea is a non-starter if they don’t agree to enter the big top. For the ARU that also means convincing the international body, the IRB; for the ARL there probably isn’t so much of a problem, Australia almost is the international body, World Cup loses aside. I’m no business man, but booking a stadium – as Franks is said to have done, but I suspect it is more like a stated intention to book – before you even mention the idea to the people that can say No isn’t a smooth move. The ARL and the ARU were clearly unaware this idea was being worked on again. From The Daily Telegraph :
ARL chairman Colin Love has agreed, in principle, to the game. (...) Australian Rugby Union chairman Peter McGrath was told about the bold proposal yesterday…
and most telling:
“I didn’t want to speak to them until they got a taste of the enormity and benefit of it,” (Phil Franks) said last night.
Enter the Daily Telegraph to help Franks get his message across to the bodies running each game. Well good luck with that, kids. I don’t fancy your chances because I think the carrot you are dangling in front of them, raising money for a childrens charity, is more easily met by other means.
For me it is the untenable notion of developing a rules set that can accommodate the two teams in a halfway balanced game that is most interesting and even more untenable. That it is intractable is a powerful reason why the ARU/IRB wouldn’t want to agree to it and to some extent the ARL. I say that the ARL would be less disinclined because of the rules because I believe that any rules set is doomed to be more disadvantageous to the rugby side than it is to the League side. They say they are coming up with a set of hybrid rules? Well in some ways there already is a set of hybrid rules, it is called rugby league. It is almost like the hybrid between touch football and rugby. That’s a controversial thing to say and certainly the easiest handle on which to dismiss my doubts. If Mark Geyer or Phil Gould ever read it or any passionate league supporter really, they’d switch off immediately and accuse me of saying rugby is a more physical game than league. That’s not at all the case. League is the midway point between the game-long contest for possession that is rugby and the lack of contest in touch1. The scrum; the ruck; the lineout. These are the means by which rugby sides contest possession. Two are gone entirely from league and the other exists only vestigially2. They are also the first to go in any hybrid rules sets.
The scrum is a complete non-starter; they might retain uncontested scrums but even in league games you still get the rare push from one side so you can hardly tell the rugby side they can’t push at all. As soon as they did they’d not just win every scrum hands down but they’d probably be at genuine risk of causing injury to a scrum made up of league players. The league scrum is a joke and the rugby scrum is dangerous enough that making sure the props know what they are doing is a matter of regulation because of the stresses involved on players bodies. How do you ask a referee to police allowing a rugby scrum to push, but not too much? Allowing a full-blown scrum doesn’t just give the Wallabies a massive advantage, it puts the Kangaroos in danger of potentially crippling injury.
Lineouts are dangerous for the league players as well because of lifting; the player being lifted is in such a dangerous position and at the mercy of the ability of the lifter to control the situation. League players obviously don’t have the experience doing this. Could you retain the lineout but bar lifting? Possibly but it is hard to imagine how the rugby side isn’t going to have an automatic advatage due to sheer weight of experience. Really, lineouts would be out and it would devolve, in the league manner, to a scrum.
The show-stopping problem though is rucks. When I started watching rugby with more than passing interest it was rucks and what they imply that took the most acclimatisation. In league you do not need to protect possession like you do in rugby, which frees you up to really charge at the defensive line with everything you have. No worries about being isolated, no worries about being put down facing the wrong way allowing the ball to be taken off you. It took me many games to get used to rugby players hitting the line in the controlled fashion that they do. If a union and a league team played each other the form of ruck adopted would set the tenor of the game because each code’s rucks are alien to the other team. The union team could adapt to a league play-the-ball, but could they adapt to what that means; the charging of the line to crash or crash through? Maybe mentally they could but I have a sneaking suspicion that rugby players would be at a physical disadvantage if they played rucks in the league style; they don’t have the experience of so many powerful collisions in one game. And on the other hand, I think if they played rugby ruck style the union side would make sure they had George Smith playing because even if the league side could train in the ruck well enough to not give away a penalty every time, the flanker would be feasting on poorly defended ball.
I’m only bothering to consider the three obviously glaring differences between the games, the contests for posession. I could talk about one of the aspects of the codes that superficially look the same but are actually radically different. Kicking for example. If you were to make the mistake of using rugby style points awards for drop goals the union side could probably win just by drop goaling over and over again; the field goal has atrophied in league to the point that even the team’s designated in-play kicker can miss from in front of the goal. Or how about marks inside the twenty-two? Retain them and the league team loses half of their try-scoring strategies. Drop the rule and the league team has been given a methodology foreign to the rugby team.
I’ve indulged myself now for a few paragraphs and honestly, I’ve given the promoters of the idea what they want. I’ve given it what little credibility I have to offer even by taking it seriously enough to consider its unsolvable flaws. If they somehow manage to get this off the ground no doubt I will watch it. I’ll watch it in the same way I am sure AFL fans watch International Rules. As a stunt.
1 Not that these is any such relationship between the three games so far as I know. The connections are being drawn by me.
2 What contest for possession that remains in league is basically pressuring the other side to make a mistake or to get repeat sets of tackles.
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# A couple of days ago, we were all Australian
Sports. Yeah.
Disappointed with the last Test in India. I can’t stand Peter Roebuck, but I begrudgingly agree with him; Ponting blinked and didn’t push the advantage Krezya had somehow managed to engineer for him. Was he mindful of a personal suspension because of the slow over rates? Ehhh; I don’t know. I am mystified by the last session of India’s second innings though.
On the other hand, Australia vs New Zealand. The first Australia vs New Zealand, in Hong Kong, made me query the multiverse in general and William in particular why Australia was even allowed to play rugby. Watching the All Blacks wink and reveal that they’ve been in third gear all along is starting to get really really depressing. I didn’t get to see the test in Twickenham – and yes, I do just like to see them lose – which I regret beyond the telling given that by all reports we beat them by beating their scrum. And by kicking a lot of penalties. So we showed them how to play like an English team. Hah!
It is raining in Brisbane. Hope it stops tomorrow because the First Test against New Zealand starts at the Gabba on Thursday. We’ve already played one game la mode Anglais and that had the charm of laughing at them while doing it. What, we’re going to laugh at the English while we play The Shire? Doesn’t seem much point, really.
Um…yeah, that about wraps up the games between Australia and New Zealand. I mean, assuming there’s no netball games on at the moment.
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# I just like to see them lose
Today, we are all Scot.
I particularly like to see any achievement by Wilkinson ∗spit∗ over-shadowed by them losing.
