Rugby league is not a sport, it's an atrocity
HEAR that? It's called silence. It's the absence of the rugby league season.
Is it not glorious? To be free of the stifling tedium of blanket coverage, the grinding banality of match commentary, the sub-trivial parish pump gossip and news of yet another player's off-field atrocity. The silence of January is golden.
The featureless white noise of the mate-against-mate, meathead-against-meathead cavalcade is comfortably distant; just a grim prospect. Like root canal treatment.
Please don't misunderstand me - I don't dislike rugby league. That requires too much of the effort which is better directed toward the herculean task of ignoring it.
It would also mean trying to take it seriously and rugby league already takes itself far too seriously.
For all the reverberating, unintentionally self-parodying hyperbole, rugby league remains, as ever it will, the blustering short man of sport. Beyond our eastern cities and one in New Zealand, some grimy towns in England's north and a few rustic French villages, rugby league does not exist. This code is a loud provincial oaf let loose upon the big city - obnoxious, flatulent and prone to publicly displaying its genitals. Please - I implore you - don't use rugby league in the same sentence as "World Cup" unless you wish to be battered by force 10 gales of laughter. Aside from its global dwarfism, its case is hindered by shoddy pretence. By all means recruit to your side a boofhead who once missed his flight and had to spend the night in Honolulu. Stick him in a kitsch kit and call him a Tomahawk, but do at least smirk knowingly when you pretend he represents the United States.
Rugby league is a platform for flogging industrial beer. It's a hot air container that temporarily inflates the flaccid careers of club circuit entertainers and their forgotten anthems. Try time? No. Try hard time.
Then there is the spectacle itself - 26 post-adolescents with hideously engorged musculature dressed each week in different livery, yet each of which somehow resembles a beverage can. These run in strict linear patterns until a mistake is made and one lot falls over the other's line. For this points are awarded.
Rugby league is painfully contrived. It is prima facie absurd. Knock a fellow down then permit him up to play the ball. Repeat several times until ball is kicked away. No sight in competitive sport is more abject than the flagrant non-aggression pact that is a rugby league scrum.
No, I don't dislike rugby league, though if I cared to I could manage to find offensive the fetish made of the game's (selective) history. How did the Johnny Come Comparatively Lately code wrest popularity from its parent? By inherent superiority? Crowd-pleasingly open play? Or the fact that for five seasons it was the only game in town?
The NSW and Queensland rugby unions suspended senior competition during World War I. Rugby league did not. When Balmain played Glebe in the 1915 grand final, young men were being sacrificed at Gallipoli. The Queensland Rugby Union was unable to reform until 1929.
By no means do I impugn those who played on or to suggest that many thousands have not worn both khaki and club colours. But it does strike me as a slightly anomalous note when the code wraps itself in the flag and has the Last Post played at its Anzac Day Test.
Merely ridiculous is the gladiatorial imagery with which rugby league is inevitably promoted. The big hits, the on-field biff that officials piously condemn, but actually exult in. Again the short man aspect is the fore. If, like me, you like to watch mixed martial arts - which is hysterically condemned despite strictly enforced rules of engagement - the spectacle of artless behemoths running into each other is depressing in the extreme.
Perhaps I do dislike rugby league, but I don't begrudge its right to exist, which is more than can be said of its attitude toward everyone else. There are still in rugby league not a few resentful rednecks who see an Australian failure in rugby or soccer as "good for our game" and the encroachment of Australian rules on its traditional turf as a crisis surpassing that of refugee boats.
Less really can be more.
In rugby league's case, much less.
Paul Pottinger is Deputy Editor of Carsguide. His heretical views in no way reflect those of The Daily Telegraph, which knows that rugby league is the greatest game in the world. Miranda Devine returns next week.
