DISCORD 2010: Edition Five

Thursday 28th January 2010

With Super League to kick off this week and the NRL following on March 12, there's a huge amount of positivity in the air for our game right now.

In the southern hemsiphere there is talk of an independent commission running the sport, while in the north tough new franchise criteria are being touted to strengthen the competition. But why is it that whenever we talk about restructuring, about strategic planning, about being more business-oriented, we never use those terms in relation to our "shop window": international football.

Internationals are often the first port of call for many people being introduced to rugby league. Aside from in Australia, they are the matches guaranteed the national publicity and big audiences which we sometimes struggle to attract with club matches. By starting our sport in new countries and widening our international talent pool, we don't just compete with other sports, we guarantee our longterm survival.

And yet the International Federation still has no fulltime office and seems to meet irregularly.  Don't worry, I'm not going to go off on some boring diatribe you've heard a thousand times before about having a office, selling sponsorships to multinationals, having weeks off for Tests, blah, blah, blah.

Instead, there are two new points I want to make. One, if the NRL can manage to put together an Independent Commission of men and women with business expertise who can make decisions solely for the good of the sport, then surely a similar commission can but put together for the international game.

In fact, we may NEED one to offset the likely parochialism of the body being formed in Australia, which will have that countries club comp as its number one priority.  Wouldn't it be great to see the likes of Russell Crowe, Scott Penn, Eric Watson and Simon Moran alongside gurus in marketing, PR and goverment funding steer our game forward on the global stage, sitting above the vested interests of member countries?

My second point is tied up in the first one.  I was speaking here in Boston to Mikhael Shammas, the founder of the Boston Thirteens in the AMNRL who is studying sports business at Harvard and plans to plough EVERYTHING he learns back onto rugby league. We talked about why we have to float along in the wake of rugby union when it comes to our expansion efforts.

Why can't we focus on countries where there is little or NO rugby union, and make our brand of rugby the first that people see rather than what is often perceived outside our heartlands as an obscure offshoot?

And he says there is a wonderful opportunity in China for our game. If we get onside with the government there - and he'll tell you the exact department - we could have millions of yuan worth of resources and tens of millions of schoolkids playing our game almost overnight.

But no-one looks into these posibilities becuse it's no-ones job to. And that's because we don't really know what the RLIF's aims are. And THAT could be because it has none.  All over the world, there is funding available to do positive things for kids - particularly in underprivileged areas. The AusAid involvement in the Prime Ministers XIII game each year and thr NRL stars trip to Rawanda is just the tip of a Titanic-sized iceberg.

Let's see a strategic plan for international rugby league and a co-ordinated approach for realising it. Let's have the RLIF negotiate television contracts years in advance, like our pro leagues do.  After all, if we're finally gonna get things right, let's not stop in Australasia.

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GEE I'd like to know what really is said when clubs sit down to decide whether to sign Willie Mason. 

OK, he's been below his best in recent seasons. But surely that's not enough for every club (bar North Queensland, so far) to say they don't want a decorated international. You could almost apply the word 'Pariah' to the bloke.

And I bet he'd love to know what they're saying about him too.

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NEXT week's Discord will come to you from home base: Sydney, Australia.  I'd like to thank everyone who has housed, fed, watered, befrended, ferried, laughed with/at and otherwise assisted me during an unbelieveable three and a half months. I owe you all, bigtime.

That's not to rule out a quick trip to the World Club Challenge, where you'll have to do it all over again for me, of course.

stevemascord@hotmail.com