“There are far too many Australians coming and playing in our game,” he said with a stern but slightly incredulous expression on his face, like a headmaster sucking on a jalapeno.
But the prevailing mood was despair. Despair that such promise had proven so utterly unfounded, but more than that, despair of England’s ability ever to put out a rugby league side capable of beating Australia.
“Imagine if we do, though,” Clarke said, perking up.
Hemmings refused to be consoled. “I’ll have packed it in by then,” he muttered sadly. “Me and him will be pushing up the daisies before an England win.”
Perhaps it was my outsider’s perspective, but all this despondency seemed a touch strange. It has, after all, been four decades since any team from these islands has beaten Australia in a decisive match. And besides, rugby league is Australia’s second biggest sport after backpacking. This wasn’t exactly the end of the Roman Empire. It wasn’t even the end of the Brittas Empire.
Throughout those four decades, the hierarchy has remained more or less static. You have Australia, and then some way back you have New Zealand and England.
Some way back from them, you have a few other nations whose participation in the sport is best classified as ‘dabbling’, and below them nothing but blank looks.
Quite apart from the success of our own Super League and the brutal intensity of the annual State of Origin series, international rugby league is an idea being held together with sticky tape and safety pins.
They couldn’t even find a decent neutral referee for Saturday’s Four Nations final. An Australian, Matt Cecchin, was selected just ahead of England’s Phil Bentham. And astonishingly, England and Australia are not scheduled to meet again until the 2013 World Cup. Don’t they realise that THERE’S NOBODY ELSE TO PLAY?
The example of rugby league should be borne in mind when gazing at the empty seats in Johannesburg, Mumbai and Sharjah over the forthcoming week.
Six of the world’s top seven cricketing nations will be in action, but from the attendances at the grounds you would scarcely know.
For years the game’s authorities have been trying to expand cricket beyond its traditional strongholds, but now it is the heartlands where its appeal is most under threat.
Rugby league is a case study of what happens when only a handful of countries are bothered. You get irregular series; a lack of meaningful competition or context; hopeless, destructive self-interest.
If that sounds familiar, then that is because these are in danger of becoming characteristics of Test cricket. If cricket is lost to the Caribbean, to New Zealand, to Pakistan, then the whole will become fatally devalued.
And for those who hold up a thriving club scene as proof of the vitality of both sports, I simply hold up to you the distraught face of Eddie Hemmings. That’s an expression that could be coming to a presenter near you at any moment. Let’s all do something before it gets to that stage.
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