This story originally appeared in the official 2017 Rugby League World Cup magazine
By STEVE MASCORD
IT’S 2002. A story appears in a match program much like this one, for Australia versus Great Britain at what was then Aussie Stadium.
The article waxes lyrical about how international rugby league could and should be promoted, with a television commercial described, showing sprawling skylines, windswept plains, floodlit stadia and players training amid beaches, bushes and basketball courts.
“Sprawling aerial shots, bugs-eye close-ups, fans, colour, kids and pros,” the starry-eyed piece beseeches.
“These are the stuff of dreams for those of us who believe rugby league needs its own little plank on the world stage; a cinematic depiction of our game in all its forms and locations, shown to the heads of big corporations who cannot help but be involved.
“Most of this will probably never happen. But if even a fraction of it is to be achieved, it has to start tonight.”
The rhetoric goes on to outline big plans for rugby league, country by country; Australia, New Zealand, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, France, Papua New Guinea, the United States, Canada, Russia, South Africa, Lebanon, Morocco, Japan, Italy, Tartastan (?), Fiji, Niue, American Samoa, Cook Islands, Tonga, Serbia, Finland and Kenya.
That night, July 12, 31,844 fans generate palpable kinetic energy inside the Moore Park arena. It’s 10 years since Britain has toured Australia and the one-off mid-season Test is seen as the way of the future, a way for anglo-Australian football to regain its rightful place at the top of the sport’s pantheon.
If anyone read the story (you’re reading this, right?), he or she could not have helped but be impressed with this cosmopolitan vision of a sport on the rise, leaving behind the dissension of the Super League War just half a decade earlier.
But within three hours of most people perusing that program, that story – in particular – seemed utterly laughable.
Australia had scored 11 tries in the way to inflicting the worst defeat in the 95-year history of British national teams, 64-10. GB coach David Waite is asked by the late Raymond Fletcher, the most venerable of English rugby league reporters, if he would resign.
And, unforgettably, the Sydney Morning Herald prints a tombstone on the cover of its Saturday sports section, inscribed with the words ‘RIP International Rugby League 1907 – 2002’. The Sydney media had got on board for this event; like many fans they felt betrayed by the comically one-sided contest.
For the next few months, spectators who felt duped into attending that night use the naïve, idealistic, happy-clappy program piece about the brave new world of international rugby league to wrap their evening rubbish.
And, I assume, they used it for even worse. The dream seemed over before it had even begun.
“ONE paper had a headline ‘RIP international football’ – that was the media’s attitude to it,” Wayne Bennett later recalled.
“I just thought it was too valuable to write off, too big a part of our history.”
Bennett, then in his 15th season as coach at the Brisbane Broncos, responded to the car crash he had watched from his lounge room by writing to the Australian Rugby League. He thought he had some ideas which would fix things, make international rugby league more competitive.
The Tri-Nations, first contested in 1999, needed to be reinstated, he argued. More competition between the big three was essential. Australian players were too battle-hardened after the rigors of the Origin series. Mid-season internationals should be played beforehand, giving the opposition of the green and gold some hope.
There was a lot of work to be done – even in season when the Warriors made the NRL grand final.
For Great Britain, a degree of redemption later in the year – a 2-0 home series victory over New Zealand with one Test drawn. But the papers weren’t exactly declaring international rugby league resurrected. The mid-season Test was gone from the southern hemisphere calendar, too, bludgeoned to death by the rampant Roos in 2002.
It was no surprise Australia won all three Tests on the 2003 Kangaroo Tour. What was a surprise: the slimness of the margins, victory secured only in the dying minutes each time. The First Test was a cliff-hanger despite Adrian Morley being sent off in the opening few seconds. David Waite had not resigned; he had instead seemed to make GB competitive once more.
The next year – just two seasons after the SFS disaster – Great Britain actually beat Australia.
The score was 24-12, the venue was then-JJB Stadium in Wigan and the coach was now Brian Noble.
While the Australians produced one of the greatest halves of rugby league ever seen in the Elland Road final, which they won 44-4, the hex was broken. Reports of international rugby league’s death had proven exaggerated.
But as it turned out, it had been wrong to assess the health of the international game based on a score line between two of the leading countries anyway.
As a journalist, I had always found it relatively easy to attend every international rugby league game that was played. Every one. It may have meant a game in Pretoria, South Africa, one day and another in Orlando, Florida the next (before the 2000 World Cup) or a red-eye from Malta to Cardiff (2007) but I could be there, notebook in hand.
I noticed things changing after that – and it happened quickly. Suddenly there were multiple games on the same day, not just two on the same weekend. Nothing short of a Tardis could get me there.
A major reason for this was the formation, six months after the SFS rout, of the Rugby League European Federation. While co-operation between the hemispheres – at the whim of big clubs in Australia and England – had often been problematic, the game was small enough on the continent to be shaped and nurtured in a more altruistic direction. The Rugby League International Federation had grown out of the old International Board but it was still a largely notional organization – regular meeting of suits plus the indefatigable Tas Baitieri, former Canterbury second rower and globe-trotting, Narrabeen-based development officer.
The RLEF tapped into the burgeoning EU bureaucracy; it could attract grants and in former Scotland international Kevin Rudd (not that one) had a leader whose own job within the Brussels-based structure allowed him to travel widely.
At first only Britain and France were full members, joined soon after by Russia.
But thanks to interest in everything EU, the sport spread – if not like wildfire, then at least like a respectable spot of back-burning. “There were seven RLEF members in 2010,” says Danny Kazandjian, the current RLEF managing director.
“Now we have 35 members and observers and another four to five nations with whom we’re currently dealing with on their applications – Congo, Cameroon, Albania, Bosnia and Georgia.
With three or four tiers of competition, full members alone soon rendered that 2002 Australia-Great Britain program article detailing random developments in random countries hopelessly out of date.
Just 15 years after that story appeared, the list of RLEF full members is: England, France, Ireland, Jamaica, Lebanon, Russia, Scotland, Serbia, Ukraine and Wales.
Associate members include: Canada, Czech Republic, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Malta, Spain, United States and Norway.
Observers are: Belgium, Catalonia, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Ghana, Hungary, Morocco, Netherlands, Nigeria, Poland, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Siera Leone, Sweden, Trinidad and Tobago.
When Sol Mokdad, head of the United Arab Emirates Rugby League, was locked up for 13 nights at the behest of rugby union authorities in 2015 – effectively outlawing the sport in Dubai – one critic derided him as merely “a chancer” – someone having a bit of a gamble in the hope of reward down the track.
That critic misunderstood the entire nature of rugby league. It’s a ‘chancer’ sport. It’s stuttering, inconsistent and chaotic expansion over more than a century can be almost solely credited to “chancers” like Mokdad.
Sure, the 22 Northern Union clubs who voted to break away from rugby union in 1895 were protecting the rights of players who could not afford time off work when injured. But they had the best players in the England team, the mill owners who ran their clubs were already dabbling in sports science and specialised training.
They felt they possessed a valuable property.
Perhaps the greatest ‘chancer’ of all was Albert Henry Baskerville, the father of not just international rugby league but of all rugby league outside Britain.
He was a rugby-playing Wellington postal clerk when he heard that in the north of England, you could pay rugby and get paid for it. He concocted a plan – he would secretly approach the greatest All Blacks of the day and ask them to agree to a professional tour of this strange new frontier.
The venture would be strictly secret until they were all on the ship and there was nothing the NZRFU could do about it.
The profits would be split and when, as was inevitable, they were banned from rugby union for the dastardly crime of professionalism, they would bring the new game home with them, start it there, and make more money.
On the way to Britain, the professional All Blacks (they all had to contribute 50 pounds to be a member of the party) stopped in for matches against a group of similar-minded renegades in Sydney. There, the SMH (them again) dubbed the visitors “All Golds” on account of their alleged greed. The stopover, which involved Baskerville recruiting an Aussie by the name of Dally Messenger for the trip, was enough to turn rugby in Sydney “gold” for good.
The Sydney premiership kicked off the next year, solidified by a visit from Baskerville’s men on the way home, during which they split themselves up between the eight Sydney clubs and taught the Aussies the game. The first Kangaroos departed for England at the end of 1908 but by then, our greatest “chancer”, Baskerville, had died after picking up a case of pneumonia in Brisbane on the final leg of his great adventure.
The All Golds had organised a match in Melbourne at the start of the tour and a trip to the United States at the end. Neither happened. How different would our sport look today if they had?
Aussie journalist Harry Sunderland, one of the fathers of rugby league in France, was also an unabashed “chancer”. He got his opportunity when le tricolors were banned from the five-nations for violence and alleged professionalism in 1931. In late 1933, Australia and Great Britain played an exhibition match in Paris and the following year the legendary Jean Galea took a touring team to Yorkshire and Lancashire before the game was officially established in France.
Entrepreneurs, financial risk and high stakes … they are where rugby league comes from.
North America? A series of would-be entrepreneurs have given it their best: Mike Dimitro, Dave Silock. Mike Mayer, John Morgan, David Niu and now Jason Moore and Eric Perez.
The much-loved PNG Kumuls made their bow in 1974 – a decade after league had been widely recognized as the national sport. But the rest of the Pacific was conquered largely by the promoter of the World Sevens, Colin Love – another ‘chancer’ – who invited professional teams to his Sydney tournament between 1988 and 2004.
Who can forget Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka leading the first Bati into battle? Or the somersaults of South African Rhino Jacob Stemag? Or how burly New York garbologist Bob Brehl became a celebrity once a year when visiting Australia with the USA Patriots?
The 1995 World Cup attempted – and succeeded – in translating this seven-a-side adventurism into real 13-a-side progress. This was international rugby league’s day in the sun – figuratively at least considering its autumn timing in England and Wales.
Fans at Keighley gasped at the athleticism of the Fijians against an unknown South African side; so much so that when the Bati took on England, kick-off at Central Park had to be delayed to let the crowd in.
Welsh crowds also rediscovered their love of the northern game, thrilling at the brutal war between the Dragons and Western Samoa and flocking to the semi-final against England at Old Trafford which attracted 30,042.
After decades of little or no expansion for what was seen by outsiders as a dreary pursuit of coal-miners and Antipodeans, things were moving quickly. So quickly, in fact, that the scene was perceived as a useful bargaining chip for media mogul Rupert Murdoch when he set up a rival competition which could be shown on his new pay television operation in Australia.
Isolating Australia was part of the plan; the 1996 World Nines in Suva involved the green-and-gold Super League team, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, England, Wales, Western Samoa, Tonga, Ireland, Scotland, Fiji, Italy, France, United States, Morocco and the Cook Islands. The Australian Rugby League’s Bob Abbott rode his bike to the team hotels of foreign players contracted by the ARL, warning them not to play.
When Super League ended after one season of split competitions in Australasia, the motivation for much of this expansion died with it. Suva still has a under-taking to be the first Pacific Super League team, last time we looked….
The Sevens died, the Nines died, the World Club Challenge died, the 2000 World Cup was hit by rain and over-ambition. The post-Super League mantra was to win back the grassroots. “Vision” became a dirty word. There was no World Cup for eight long years.
In 2008 Down Under, the tournament was dramatically scaled back from 16 teams to just 10. But an historic 34-20 win for New Zealand in the tumultuous Suncorp Stadium final turned the sport on its head.
The country that brought rugby league to Australia’s shores 101 years earlier had finally risen, claimed its karmic reward. International rugby league was back on track and four teams were added for the 2013 tournament in Britain and France.
It’s important to remember the 2008 tournament was the first time rugby league had ever even had enough nations to stage World Cup qualifiers. Lebanon missed out on a penalty and a countback twice before qualifying for the tournament you are now watching.
Yet things have come so far, so quickly, that the United States and South Africa were bidding seriously to host the 2021 tournament. That World Cup will revert to England but in 2025 we are embarking on our greatest venture as a sport, taking our game to the cities of North America with a World Cup.
By then, we are expected to have professional clubs across the most important continent in world sports. This year saw the debut of the Toronto Wolfpack; I attended their first and last home games, their first friendly, their first comp game.
Canadians with no knowledge of the NRL or the Super League War or the headstone in the paper, clamouring for jerseys and caps and photos with FuiFui MoiMoi.
These were deeply moving experiences for a life-long treiziste – but no more moving than seeing for the first time the television campaign for the 2017 World Cup in Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea.
There they were: the beaches, the villages, the city skylines, the basketball court, the dusty fields and rickety gymasiums. The sweeping, cinematic camera shots, the players throwing balls through tires and skipping in the dust.
When I first saw that, I have to admit I felt a tears welling up. Lots of them. Enough for it to become necessary to wipe them away.
Why?
Because it was I who wrote that story in 2002.
