http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/blinkered-view-in-the-grandstand/2008/07/29/1217097237942.html
Someone has the balls to tell it how it is - wonder how many angry letters this guy is going to get tomorrow??
"Rugby league is undergoing a bout of unusually deep soul-searching after announcements of the departure of two of its finest exponents, Sonny Bill Williams and Mark Gasnier, to the euro-paved pitches of French rugby union.
This dramatic news has broken when several clubs are struggling financially, and league administrators are becoming concerned about the expansionism of football (once known as soccer) and Australian rules (now establishing a bridgehead in Sydney's western suburbs league heartland).
It is a bitter irony the code is celebrating its first 100 years in Australia. The Rugby League World Cup to be staged here this year, with its 10 teams in three uneven pools, will serve to show how small the rugby league world is in the context of global sport. All this is not terribly surprising, but league devotees have been distinguished by their reluctance to look beyond the game's popularity in NSW and Queensland.
Coolly appraised, league is a code largely confined to the shores of the Tasman Sea in an intensely competitive national market that cannot be insulated from external forces. All sport relies on passionate identification by fans with clubs and players, and league has that in spades. But there are not enough fans, and they are too concentrated in a few areas, for league's prognosis to be benign.
That league is so popular on pay TV but has relatively small crowds stranded in oversized stadiums says something significant about its health and future. The Williams and Gasnier cases, and the steady leakage of lesser lights to the English Super League (a misnomer if ever there was one), do not mean that league is dying. The game can find its niche in parts of Australasia and northern Europe, but its future lies in consolidation and managed decline, rather than imperialistic sporting growth.
Two years ago I tried to do my bit for analysing the state of league when delivering the annual Tom Brock lecture at its stronghold, the NSW Leagues Club, following in the distinguished footsteps of diehard rugby league folk such as Tom Keneally, Roy Masters and Alex Buzo. Its provocative title, The Stuff Of Dreams, Or The Dream Stuffed? Rugby League, Media Empires, Sex Scandals And Global Plays, signalled the need to ask some hard questions about league.
I argued that despite official assertions of a thriving truce since the Super League war, the scars of the Murdoch-Packer collision are still visible and have compromised league's claim to be the "people's game". Sexual, alcohol-related and financial scandals have eroded its moral authority. When considered against the rapidly developing world game of football, the poorly managed but reasonably international and well-connected rugby union, and the vibrant national indigenous game of Australian rules, league was looking at the permanent wooden spoon among the four codes.
I got a good hearing from those who love the game and think deeply about its welfare, but also received a fair bit of abuse by email, phone and on websites - and even some snide comments from the Fairfax press. Today, though, such heresies have become orthodox, and fewer league aficionados and mavens seem to be in denial.
Rugby league, though, is not the only sport confronting these issues in a world where the sports business can conjure up mind-boggling piles of dosh to tempt professionals to switch countries, clubs and codes faster than they can say, "I'm really committed to What's the team's name again?"
Even the English Premier League football leviathan has problems, with this northern summer's sports news silly season dominated by Cristiano Ronaldo's determination to leave Manchester United for Real Madrid. Ronaldo has another four years to run on a contract worth $250,000 a week, but received encouragement from Sepp Blatter, the president of the world football governing body, FIFA, who sees Ronaldo's case as symptomatic of "too much modern slavery" in the game. Setting aside the gross offence to the real slaves who were sentenced to lives of unpaid servitude in foreign lands, Sonny Bill's reported weekly pay in France will be barely a tenth of Ronaldo's.
In its centenary year rugby league has been revealed as fairly small beer in global terms, and faces the prospect of a diminished place in the hierarchy of Australian sport. The first step in ensuring its future is to dispense with its well-developed propensity for self-delusion.
Professor David Rowe is director of the centre for cultural research, University of Western Sydney, and author of Sport, Culture And The Media: The Unruly Trinity."
