I needed a rest from that NRL season. I think it’s a long, brutal season. That was the first thing: just rest.
Was that Joseph Suaalii speaking, or the rest of us?
Either way, we both got two weeks off, Suaalii because he’s now earning $20,000 a week, everyone else because … why again? Oh – the Pacific Championships. Forgot. Silly us. So we have to postpone that surgery, dry up from your Mad Mondays and Wacky Wednesdays and get back on the couch.
When the highest-paid player in the NRL, Kalyn Ponga, prioritised rest ahead of representing the Pacific Championships, he was publicly humiliated. First he had to call national coach Mal Meninga, recant on his decision, apologise, make excuses for “the process”, and beg forgiveness. Then he was not picked anyway.
Ponga was scolded from on high for forgetting what a great honour it is to represent the Kangaroos, told it was the pinnacle of rugby league, and so on. His crime? Saying what nearly everyone else was thinking.
If the Kangaroos are being disrespected and downgraded by anyone or anything, it is by a schedule that has them playing in October. The 2024 season has demonstrated rugby league’s much-bruited “sweet spot”, and no arguments there. Fantastic games, a memorable Origin series capped by one of the all-time great finishes, and a climax to the NRL season that had the best against the best, at their best and Penrith proving themselves bestest.
Where do you go from there? The head screams Maldives, the heart screams family, the body screams rehab. But the league, in its wisdom, screams more. It goes on a four-country, four-week crawl through Australia, PNG, Fiji, New Zealand and back to Australia where the finals will be played in the cricket season. A lot of us will watch, but, like the players, it will be through inertia, and (like the players) we’ll need constant pep talks to remind us that we’re still on the, er, pinnacle of the game.
Not as easy as you think . . . Mal Meninga trains the Kangaroos.Credit: NRL Photos
Hardest done by is Mal. Consider his position. His reputation as a coach rests on how much more he can squeeze out of bone-weary players with motivational talks about how much they need to beat their Pacific rivals, most of whom are their club teammates and friends (and who, for obvious reasons, don’t need as much motivational effort to beat Australia).
Mal begins the campaign on Friday with a team missing, conservatively, five of his first-choice squad. Many of the NRL’s best have also chosen to play for Tonga because that, not the Kangaroos, is the pinnacle of their game.
Left with a squad brought back to the field by injury, unavailability and the bad Ponga, Mal has to make these players want to shed blood and sweat they have not already shed every week since March for their club and state jerseys. And if, like last year, they end up running out of blood and sweat against the Kiwis, Mal gets blamed.
They say every coaching gig is tough, but Mal’s is the toughest, primarily because nobody thinks it is. One day, when he’s retired and doesn’t have to work so hard to rev up so many others, Mal will admit that he did his best after being dealt a bad hand.
The high and mighty sat with him and told the public how representing his Kangaroos was the highest honour for Australian rugby league players, but their actions said otherwise. Only Mal really believed it, and Mal had most to lose.
So what can be done? If the Australian Rugby League Commission want to show they believe that the international game and the Kangaroos jersey are the pinnacle, perhaps they might treat them as such, and schedule them in a representative window … during the rugby league season?
But this has been done before, until the NRL became such a cash cow that the clubs, the broadcasters and the ruling body decided a rep window was the too-hard basket. Club coaches didn’t want their players injured in international fixtures. The Origin monster gobbled up mid-winter. It became hard enough shoe-horning Origin and club rounds into those awkward June-July weeks, what was left for the Kangaroos? October. A bit of November. Whatever they say, the code’s actions put international rugby league on a third tier beneath the NRL and Origin, leaving Mal to pick up the pieces.
Joseph Suaalii chatting to coach Joe Schmidt in camp with the Wallabies.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
What other options are there? It seems radically unorthodox to say this in the age of more is more, but this is a case of less being more. If you want Kangaroos matches to be as special as they could be, dial down the supply. Give them scarcity value. Have them play only every two, three or four years.
With the NRL’s looming expansion to a shorter season (which everybody agrees is a great magic trick and a genuine good idea), there is an acknowledgement that a little less league, fewer injuries, more care for jaded players and fans, is a path to prosperity. Other codes have realised this. The NFL, the world’s richest football competition, is, at 18 weeks, one of the shortest. In rugby, contrast the excitement of a quadrennial Lions tour with the humdrum annual Bledisloe Cup. Even if your team is going to get flogged, once every four years feels like an event.
If the Kangaroos only played two or three series in Nathan Cleary’s or Cameron Munster’s careers, you can bet they would be fit and available. Mal wouldn’t have to take phone calls from Ponga. The Kangaroo honour wouldn’t have to argue for its own relevance. Scarcity could even provide a mask for league’s thin international presence. The Pacific Championships are designed to provide excitement and encouragement for Pacific nations, and this is so, especially when they beat Australia. But Mal and his players shouldn’t have to be in the missionary position every spring, making sacrifices for geopolitics.
The best solution, and the one that shows real respect for the Kangaroos and the Pacific nations? In a representative window in June and July, play Origin and the Pacific Championships every alternating year. Oh no, no annual Origin? It would actually help Origin to be one-year-on, one-year-off, and it would add genuine meaning to the… Pacific Championships.
Peter V’landys says he’s up for new ideas, and this one is a lot less dumb than Penrith playing Wigan in Magic Round.
Meanwhile, Mal does his best, attention dribbles away, and Joseph Suaalii looks like he’s onto something. In November, represent the Wallabies in London or the Kangaroos in Homebush? It takes some creativity to make Australian rugby league look like an inferior spectacle to rugby union, but they might just have managed it.
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