Is Rugby League Dying?
England's Stefan Ratchford appears dejected during the match at the Halliwell Jones Stadium, ... [+] Warrington. Picture date: Friday June 25, 2021. (Photo by Mike Egerton/PA Images via Getty Images) PA Images via Getty Images  Theres a rule in journalism, known as Betteridge's law of headlines, which states that any question posited in a headline is always answerable with no. So good news, then, because rugby league is apparently dying. The late rites for the game have been delivered across social media, traditional media and just about anywhere else you care to look in the last week.With Australia and New Zealand potentially pulling out of the 2021 World Cup, plus a State of Origin landslide, a crackdown on concussions in the National Rugby League (NRL) and England losing to a ragtag bunch of All Stars last Friday night, you might as well write the obit now. Actually, to draw back the curtain of journalism again, itll already be written. As anyone who has heard this weeks Rugby Reloaded podcast by the ever-excellent historian Tony Collins will know, the sport has been DOA for decades: it was pronounced stillborn 5 weeks after conception in 1895, then roughly once every two weeks ever since. In fact, its hard to think of a time when we werent at deaths door. Happily, Im here to tell you that it is a load of nonsense. Sure, Australia and New Zealand might pull out of the World Cup, which would result in it being postponed by a year, but international rugby league wont stop and is actually being played more widely than ever before. The death of international game has been predicted for decades, always prematurely, but the machinations behind the scenes (as reported in these pages last week) are creating a situation where, for the first time ever, it might end up having a sustainable future. Super League is at a low ebb, but theres this big pandemic going on (if you havent noticed) and Northern England, more than pretty much anywhere else in Europe, has been harshly hit. LEEDS, ENGLAND - MARCH 28: General view of play during the Betfred Super League match between Hull ... [+] FC and Huddersfield Giants at Emerald Headingley Stadium on March 28, 2021 in Leeds, England.Sporting stadiums around the UK remain under strict restrictions due to the Coronavirus Pandemic as Government social distancing laws prohibit fans inside venues resulting in games being played behind closed doors. (Photo by Gareth Copley/Getty Images) Getty Images  Its hard to get metrics on how it is going without the traditional currency of attendances, but if you look at TV ratings (up), a different story is told, especially when you factor in the general move away from traditional methods of consuming broadcast sport. For a game that is apparently dead outside of small Northern towns, both the first and second tier are topped by French teams, while the womens game, as evidenced by the recent Challenge Cup Final (the first to be broadcast nationwide in the UK) and Womens Origin, is bigger and better than ever before. Womens participation numbers are up almost 200% in New South Wales. Jermaine McGillvary, the Huddersfield winger, gave a shopping list of problems last week, and said that the game had declined. The question that nobody asked of him was compared to when?  Five years ago, Super League had a confusing structure that nobody liked, England performed poorly at the Four Nations and the gap between the Super League and the NRL had never been wider. Ten years ago, England got thrashed by Australia in the Four Nations Final, lost to an international All Stars team and Super League saw one of its teams, Crusaders, withdraw from the competition, while another, Wakefield, were in administration. Im not sure that were worse off than then, especially given the huge factors that have been outwith the control of Super League, such as the pandemic. Before the 2008 World Cup, the tournament was considered untenable, such was the failure in 2000. The 2006 Tom Brock Lecture in Sydney, delivered by eminent academic David Rowe, described rugby league described the game as the most vulnerable of the football codes in Australia, and the one with the slightest prospects for future prosperity. Internet evidence is harder to find earlier than that, but I read the letters page of League Express for about the decade before that and it was hardly a hive of optimism. SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - JULY 17: A Maroons supporter in the crowd celebrates as they are awarded a try ... [+] during game three of the ARL State of Origin series between the New South Wales Blues and the Queensland Maroons at ANZ Stadium on July 17, 2013 in Sydney, Australia. (Photo by Mark Kolbe/Getty Images) Getty Images  As for the NRL, its hard to see what Australian rugby league fans are complaining about. New South Wales crushing victory over Queensland is killing State of Origin, except when Queensland crushed New South Wales for the better part of a decade, Origin TV ratings actually went up. The game is apparently dead because of lopsided results in the NRL caused by the six again rule, except if you look at all the other competitions that use it, blowouts occur no more frequently than they ever did. The crackdown on concussions in Australia is a good thing that everyone else in the sport has been doing for years, not to mention something that is designed to stave off lawsuits in the future. As Benjamin Pavards farcical concussion incident in Euro 2020 showed, other, bigger sports are light years behind rugby league (and others) in dealing with this. The recent media narrative would make one think that there is something uniquely rugby league about the early prognosis of death of the game. This could not be further from the truth. In my life, I am first a supporter of rugby league, then a supporter of Scottish football (or at least, the green and white bit of it), and thirdly a supporter of test cricket. Naturally, Im quite used to being told that my favourite sports are dying. If you type Is test cricket into Google, the first autocorrect follows with dying. If you type Is rugby union into Google, the second is dying in Australia. You get similar answers for baseball, boxing and golf. If you type Is football you get on TV tonight. There might be a message in there. (If you type Is Scottish football you get a joke?, ironically a joke I couldnt bear to leave out). Its quite telling that the answer for Is rugby league comes up with dying first and in the Olympics second, which seems like a quantum moment for the direction of the sport. David Mark, of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, wrote a similar piece on the death-non-death of Test Cricket. Previously, spin bowling died and latterly, batting has died. Shashank Manohar, no less than the President of the International Cricket Council at the time, read the last rites on Test Cricket in early 2019. Youll notice that, two years and a pandemic later, we just had a World Test Championship Final, Australia hosted an all-time great Test series with India and theres an Ashes about to happen. Rugby union in Australia, apparently, is stone dead in the ground, killed by (variously) concussion, AFL and rugby league. If youre in the UK, its staring into the abyss. If youre in New Zealand, its sold its soul to private equity, which made me keel over laughing that rugby union people could possibly be outraged at their sport having too many rich people. NEWCASTLE, AUSTRALIA - FEBRUARY 08: Waratahs players look dejected after the loss during the round 2 ... [+] Super Rugby match between the Waratahs and the Blues at McDonald Jones Stadium on February 08, 2020 in Newcastle, Australia. (Photo by Ashley Feder/Getty Images) Getty Images  Obviously, rugby league is not dying. More people play it professionally than ever before. More people watch it on television and through other, less easily quantifiable means, than ever before. Stadiums are better, facilities are better and 50% of the population actually have pathways now. That isnt to say that it is in rude health, but to be honest, in my 32 years on this planet, Im not sure that it ever has been, at least not in the eyes of the rugby league public. In the late 80s, when (if you listen to English rugby league fans) everyone from the Queen downwards knew who Ellery Hanley was, there was one full-time professional team and attendances were roughly half of what they were in 2019. Oh, and there was zero rugby league on British TV outside of the Challenge Cup for two whole seasons. When the English game finally got a shot in the arm from pay TV, Australia promptly tore itself apart over, you guessed it, pay TV. Im not saying things arent bad, but as a sport, rugby league excels in fake nostalgia. As fans, rugby league people can be chippy, pessimistic, parochial and prone to distrust authority. This lot are a shower, sack em all, couldnt organize a piss up in a brewery. Disgrace since 1895. Only care about themselves that lot. As the only game created by and for working class people, this isnt surprising at all: the game began and thrived in one of the most heavily unionized societies in history, where authority was (rightly) held in contempt, and its culture was devised by the worlds most advanced and educated working classes. Subsequently, those people had most of what they held dear taken away from them, as staple industries were killed off and jobs extinguished, never to return. As the line from the 1990s went: they took our jobs, now theyre taking our leisure. If people are chippy and negative, its because theyve had things taken off them for years and had to fight for everything they hold dear. Rugby league people are also bloody-minded, humble and prone to take the side of the collective over the individual. When players do well, its always the boys (or more recently, the girls) and never themselves. As a sport, sublimation of the individual to the team is paramount. Thats why, despite a century of obituaries, we continue, forwards, onwards. Having grown up in the heartlands of British rugby league, it is heartening to see that these values are largely shared in Australias rugby league regions. Listening to rugby league people, youd think that rugby league had never had a good administrator at any point, despite existing for more than 125 years. The last thing that chimes with rugby league culture is a sense of perspective: every rule change, structural change and innovation has been made on the fly, every prognosis terminal, every decision a disgrace, every administrator a clown. As a sport, we deal in feelings and monochrome, which is entirely our right as fans. But step back, and perspective, history and trajectory disagree. Rugby league is not as strong as it was in the late-2000s. Then, it appeared that the growth of the Pay TV boom in the mid-1990s had solidified and expanded, the international game had been rejuvenated and Super League and the NRL were both relatively strong. Needless to say, there were still countless discussion pieces to be found online about the death of the game, in Sydney, England and elsewhere. So stop panicking. Try to think about where we were, where we have come from and where we are going. Its not perfect. But its not dead. The NRL Outsider drops every week. To read it first, subscribe for free above by clicking in the top right-hand corner of your screen. You can also follow my work on Twitter at @MikeMeehallWood. Follow me on Twitter.