The biggest mistake you can make with rugby league is to kid yourself it’s a professional sport.
On the surface, it gives the appearance of a grown-up football code.
Players are stronger, fitter and faster than they’ve ever been, with wingers putting on a circus act each week, bending their bodies midair to plant the ball in the corner for a try.
Clubs, too, have mostly raised the bar. It’s not hard to work out which ones are wisely spending their $17 million annual club grants and those that are throwing it away.
The NRL rakes in hundreds of millions of dollars in TV and wagering revenue, meaning it can pay players and clubs enormous bounties while also squeezing in a lavish Hangover-style trip to Las Vegas to start next season.
Yet there are noticeable instances of when rugby league looks like a pub competition, and never more so than in the first week of the finals series.
Why won’t anyone play with me? Allianz Stadium at Moore Park in Sydney.
For that is the time of year when fans are jammed into suburban grounds the size of a phone box while big, new stadiums that cost the taxpayer billions of dollars remain unused.
On Saturday night, 13,000 souls will be shoehorned into PointsBet Stadium in the Sutherland Shire for the Sharks’ elimination final against the Roosters.
Meanwhile, the new $838 million Allianz Stadium, 20 kilometres up the road at Moore Park, with a capacity of 45,500, will sit alone in silence, wondering why nobody wants to play with it.
(It’s OK, Allianz. This is how many of us spend our Saturday nights, eating an almond Magnum, staring vacantly into the distance, wondering where it all went wrong).
PointsBet Stadium in Woolooware, south of Sydney.Credit: Getty
Various stadium, ticketing and club sources who know a thing or two about a thing or two, reckon the Sharks-Roosters final could get as many as 38,000 people through the gate if it was played at Allianz. In other words, three times what the crowd will be at Cronulla’s home ground of PointsBet.
Is the NRL going to play there? Well, of course not.
Which major code in the world locks out 25,000 fans from attending a post-season match? I’d love to know.
This isn’t a criticism of Cronulla, who have every right to play at their home ground in the first week of the finals. This story has been written many, many times about Penrith, Manly and, occasionally, the Dragons.
ARL Commission chairman Peter V’landys.Credit: Dean Sewell
It’s a criticism of the system, man. The system! And it must change.
“If you’ve worked your guts out all year, then it’s up to the club where they want to play it,” ARL Commission chairman Peter V’landys told this masthead on Monday.
That’s not right: the NRL is the sole authority of where and when matches are played during the finals and it has, for many years, taken the path of the least resistance and allowed clubs to play at home in the first week of the finals.
This is all well and good for clubs that play in one-team cities or those, like the Roosters, Parramatta, Souths and the Bulldogs, who call Sydney’s largest stadiums home.
These stadiums don’t belong to the clubs but the state. Allianz isn’t the Roosters’ home ground as much as it is Sydney’s – a world-class facility that should be used as much as possible.
Problems start with clubs like Cronulla that play at grounds built in the 1960s. It’s even more noticeable this year, with PointsBet’s capacity reduced because of the redevelopment of the adjoining leagues club.
The NRL says it’s reluctant to change the system because the clubs – and, more specifically, coaches – want every possible advantage.
Yet surely the NRL has worked out by now that clubs and coaches will never do what’s best for the game. They’ll do what’s best for them.
A professional code sets its own agenda and does what’s best for the greater good. Locking out tens of thousands of fans is not for the greater good.
There’s the tired old argument about clubs being robbed of an advantage for finishing higher on the ladder.
The greatest advantage of the finals system is that the higher you finish, the less chance you have of being knocked out in the first week if you lose.
An obvious solution of playing matches in the big, shiny new stadiums is giving members of the higher-placed club the first bite at buying tickets. Under the current system, members from opposing clubs can buy tickets at the same time.
In this instance, give Sharks members a 24-hour window to buy tickets at Allianz before opening it to Roosters members and then, after that, whoever else wants to attend.
Problem solved. To whom should I send the invoice?
The NRL’s stadium policy under former chairs John Grant and Peter Beattie, and former chief executives Dave Smith and Todd Greenberg, was a preference for clubs to play in world-class stadiums like Allianz Stadium and CommBank Stadium with the headline matches – Origins, grand finals, preliminaries and so on – played at Accor.
That was the pitch to the NSW government as it finally heeded the call for Sydney to have world-class sporting and entertainment infrastructure.
Then V’landys swept to power and, in his indomitable way, turned things on its head, asking for the $800 million allocated to Accor to be used on suburban grounds along with “centres of excellence”.
It was a smart play from a man of the peeps. Rugby league fans aren’t just tribal but also intransient: if they can’t walk to the ground, or have to catch more than one train or bus, they’ll stay at home and watch on TV while inhaling a box of almond Magnums.
Rugby league should never abandon the ’burbs. There’s nothing quite like standing on the hill watching footy, weighing up whether the queue for beer or the toilet is longest.
But the NRL should be flexible enough to play finals matches in bigger stadiums when warranted.
It has repeatedly threatened to take the grand final to faraway cities if the NSW government doesn’t give it the $800 million in funding that was allocated for Accor.
But it is playing poker with a decidedly bad hand if it refuses to use the expensive stadiums that have been built mostly for rugby league’s benefit.
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