The Greatest Game

The well-publicised Australia day match up between Super League champions Leeds Rhinos and Russell Crowe’s South Sydney Rabbitohs has been heralded as a huge success by the local press in Jacksonville.

Aside from a hefty 12,500 people cramming into the stadium despite the poor weather, the real success of the match has to have been the press coverage of the game before, during and after the match.

Jacksonville.com, the major online press outlet for a city with twice the population of Manchester, continues to provide great exposure days after the game with photos from the match sitting alongside articles on the local primaries for the US Presidential election. The site also covered the game with an excellent match report from Francine King who, rather than trying to focus on the particulars of the match, covers the occasion at a breakneck speed reminiscent of the game it seems the Americans saw.

It has been talked about many a time how the US, although vast in size, could take to the sport. Rugby league is fast, it has high scores and it is brutal - key features behind leading North American sports such as Ice Hockey and American Football - everything that sports such as football and rugby union fail to be. And, although the appearance and work of ambassador Russell Crowe had more than a little to do with the big attendance, it is a massive kick in the right direction, and one that will help the regular tenants of the ground - Jacksonville Axemen - attract a few more people when their third AMNRL campaign kicks off in June.

Of course, the real work begins now.

Photo by Bob Self, from www.jacksonville.com (usage policy)

Since before the dawn of Super League in 1996, talk throughout the sport has been about expansion and improving the game’s image outside of the perceived ‘M62 corridor’.

For some this has meant “bring in any new team outside of the heartlands and hang the traditional clubs that fail to appeal to the new audience,” and throughout the initial years where the inclusion of Paris St Germain and London nearly sent Keighley to their death, this seemed to be the case.

But things are changing in the way ‘expansionists’ are thinking. The esteemed failure of the Paris club coupled with the stuttering progress of London and the sacrificing of Gateshead in 1999 to create Hull FC have brought the promise of a new era of commonsense as rugby league moves forward. Les Catalans Dragons were the second French team to be artificially inseminated into Super League but, whereas Paris were included on the premise of being a being in a big city, Catalans were brought in having been in a rugby league heartland with three years to build and prepare for their inclusion in the northern hemisphere’s elite league competition.

With Celtic Crusaders, there has been a bottom-up approach to their possible inclusion, allowing the team to work through the lower divisions and build up a supporter base. Having attracted a record National League 2 attendance against Oldham last term, it would seem that plenty are predicting Super League status in 2009, although a lot will depend on their off field success this year and one suspects that another three years of development would see them primed for Super League inclusion.

All this talk of the future of rugby league in the northern hemisphere ignores the traditional smaller clubs. Clubs like Castleford, Hull KR, Widnes and Salford are all knocking on the door for Super League franchises and smaller clubs such as Whitehaven, Workington, Featherstone and Swinton have all had their flirtations with success in the past. It would be crass and offensive to the sport to simply ignore these clubs and sentence them to life in the doldrums. Now it seems that the RFL have acknowledged this.

The franchise system’s points system has offered any club the chance to make it into the elite. By improving work off the field, any club can theoretically knock heads with the top clubs when the next batch of franchise applications comes up for review. Doncaster realised this but took it too quickly and paid for it in 2007 but are again moving in the right direction and are now in a group of underdogs alongside Featherstone and Leigh who have been making the right noises and, more importantly, the right actions off the field which will make the decision for 2012 franchises very difficult indeed.

And it is the work of these clubs that is making the future of rugby league very bright. Work is being done outside the heartlands to make way for expansion and with a competitive balance of successfully operating clubs across the north of England, rugby league is finally moving in the right direction no matter where you live.