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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# Finals
I get asked, as men are at this time of the year1 when other men are around and there is a degree of unfamiliarity, I get asked What team I go for. Who is my team? Is my team in the finals? If not, which team will I lend my grudging and temporary support? Who’s going to win.
Yeah, that’s right. It’s a sports post. I figured it was time since I had selfishly not blogged the State of Origin games. I had this pointed out to me a couple of months ago. Never before have I felt the burdens of my readership of -10 people – I need a natural 20 just to be read! – so keenly as I did then when I realised I had let the side down so by not babbling for 7 ½ paragraphs about the magnificence that was seeing The Grub, Paul Gallen, give Queensland so many gift penalties. What a shithead.
I find that question uncomfortable to answer. Not necessarily because I have to confess to supporting a team that is irredeemably crap – say, Souths – or because I am supporting a team that is traditionally disliked, but because I am not a True Fan. That is, I am not someone who bleeds the colours of a particular team. I do not have team flags, team jerseys2, know the names of the top 25 players in both first and reserve grades, have children named after members of the team’s All Star roster, or any of that. I just don’t have that intensity of passion. I have too many eyes. What I do have is a surplus of middling support which I dole out to a number of teams. Six in fact. Out of fifteen.
Obviously I support all three Queensland-based teams. That’s just common sense. You have to support fellow Queenslanders as they enter the field of battle, competing against the hardest, toughest, least sentimental, and greates cheats in the entire world. I refer, of course, to the National Rugby League organisation. A cartel of NSW ex-players and officials, resentful of the fearsome natural talent of Queensland’s teams who set out each year to ensure that eye-gougers from Sydney get off scotfree while a congratulatory handshake from a Queensland-based player will earn him three weeks on the sideline.
And since I am going for Queenslanders, I might as well go for Melbourne as well, since they are practically a Queensland team anyway. Their best players play for Queensland, their feeder clubs are Queensland-based. They are another target of whinging, moaning and maligning accusations from the moral midgets at the farrago of duplicity and lies otherwise known as the Daily Telegraph, NRL judiciary and Sydney-base clubs.
I support Wests Tigers because, well, technically they are the local team. They play three of their thirteen home games in Campbelltown; I live in the Campbelltown area. There’s a latin phrasem I’d like to use here – because it’d make me look clever – that translates to “Support your local team because you look like an arsehole if you don’t”, but unfortunately such a phrase doesn’t exist. Or at least it hasn’t come down the ages to us in the pages of Tacitus or Livy. What a shame; it’d be quite useful to round off this paragraph, an amusing way to disguise the lack of ironic one-eyed victimhood.
And finally, there is Easts. I like to tell people I’ve been going for Easts since before there was a Queensland team in the national comp; before there was even a national competition, back in the day when it was the NSWRL. That would be a lie. I didn’t really even follow the league until after the first Queensland teams entered the competition. No, the real story is that…I betrayed Queensland by disliking the Brisbane Broncos. I know; the dangers I am undertaking, admitting it here in the face of the threat of legal remonstration. I think though that the statue of limitations has passed so I am safe. Also, I think my reasoning would, now that time has passed and passions have ebbed, would get me off even if I was dragged before a court of equity. I couldn’t support Brisbane after what they done to King Wally. So I had to pick another team. Easts were, at the time, captained by a New Zealander, so I figured I could support them and assuage my guilt by telling myself that they weren’t completely tainted by NSWishness. And after he left? Well, the road to hell is paved with good intentions; or in my case, Kiwi halfbacks.
To offset my overflowing cup of support, I have another aspect to my sporting character; every game has one team that everybody but their fans hates. The New England Patriots, for example, in the NFL. In the NRL it is the Manly Sea Eagles. Well, yeah, I hate them as well. I hate them for all the right reasons, none of which are even remotely relevant to reality at any time after 1986. They’re arrogant. They’re the rich silvertails. They swoop in with their sense of entitlement and steal away the cram of the playing crop. I seethe with unbridled contempt for them and cheer when they lose. I just also feel the same way about St George as well. And Parramatta.
And the Bulldogs.
My dislike of Cronulla is different though. While I may dislike certain players in the aforementioned Four Teams of the Apocalypse – Mark Gasnier, Brett Stewart, Jarred Hayne…I’m sure there is someone at Belmore – there aren’t really any players I would cheer to see hurt. I would cheer, loudly, to see Paul Gallen and Greg Bird of the Cronulla Sharks hurt. One is merely a grub on the field. The other is a grub off the field and seems to have just enough good timing to get his big hits in a split second before they are deemed late and fouls.
It is the semi-finals this week. Manly and Cronulla are playing in separate games, against Auckland and Melbourne respectively. It is my opinion that they will end up playing the Grand Final against each other. And thus, I am torn. There will be two teams I hate playing for the premiership. Who do I support? I have to support someone or else what is the point of watching? I can’t just support the game because no matter what happens, one of those teams will be lifting the trophy at the end of the game and thus clearly, rugby league is the loser regardless of whose thuggish mitts are lofting it skyward. I think, on the balance of things, it is going to have to be Manly who I grudgingly direct my lukewarm cheers towards. Because at least I can look forward to a week of wailing and sobbing and hate from Cronulla because even when they get to the grand finals, they still can’t win a premiership. Forty-two More Years should be the rallying call for everyone on this side of the Captain Cook Bridge.
Also, go the Cats. I’m obligated to say that because all of my co-workers, the ones I talk to every day anyway, support Hawthorn.
1 In March as well.
2 I do have one jumper in team colours, but it is a jumper, not a replica jersey3.
3 The exception is Queensland, of course. I have a Queensland origin jersey that gets worn precisely three times a year and has never in eight years been washed. Queensland is the exception though, they are a rep team and it is mandatory for Queenslanders to support them rabidly. It’s the law.
