Australia’s thrashing of New Zealand in its Rugby League World Cup opener last night has laid bare the absurdly one-sided nature of the competition. Supposedly a universal celebration of the working-class game, the World Cup in fact has only highlighted so far the paucity of league talent around the globe.
The fact that New Zealand, the tournament second-favourite, can get beaten 30-6 by Australia – and that was a flattering scoreline for the Kiwis given the lopsidedness of the possession count - shows just how worryingly uncompetitive this World Cup is likely to be.
At Centrebet, Australia is a $1.13 favourite, England and New Zealand on the next line of betting at $7, and you can write your own ticket for the other seven nations competing. (The English fared little better than the Kiwis in their opener, only just overcoming a spirited Papua New Guinea.)
Of the 12 World Cups held so far, Australia have won nine, and Great Britain three. On the strength of the opening matches over the weekend, get on Australia at $1.13 to make it championship No.10; it should be like finding money in the street.
Rugby League is a boutique sport – if boutique is the right word; maybe ‘niche’ is better – played in coalmining towns in the north of England, pockets of France, Ireland and Scotland, through the Pacific Islands and New Zealand, and, of course, along the Australian eastern seaboard. And it is tough, incredibly tough. In fact, there can be fewer sports in the world - apart from the various forms of pugilism – that require the sort of courage it takes to play league.
So, in these sensitive new age times, where ’soccer moms’ get mentioned in major political speeches, junior soccer is enjoying boom times and people are worried about 600kg horses getting smacked on the rump a few times by 50kg jockeys, the game is unlikely to win a raft of new converts.
No, the Rugby League World Cup is shaping up much like the netball World Cup, or a World Sumo Championship, or an AFL World Title, or even a World Showdown in Pesapallo, otherwise known as Finnish baseball. They are sports that are played seriously by only a handful of countries. Which is fine, because not every sport can have the global appeal, and reach, of soccer.
But a gathering of those countries every four or five years does not constitute a World Championship; it is just a small-town showcasing of their sport that only serves to underline its parochial and provincial nature.
