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http://www.stuff.co.nz/thepress/4765219a21536.html
League of Its Own
It has become as fashionable as getting legless drunk in Cup Week for sporting cynics to bag the allegedly oxymoronic Rugby League World Cup.
Well, I'm with Wayne Bennett, the Kiwis' technical adviser and Broncos' guru, who said prior to the semi-final: "We have to stop listening to people who say the World Cup isn't working. It is working. The crowds are good, the football has been great and it's going to make a dollar."
Australia's invincibility seems to be the critics' biggest beef. Strangely, many of these same sages love to crow about the All Blacks' peerless test record (between World Cups).
Only two of the 20 teams at last year's Rugby World Cup were capable of winning the title and one only made it as far the quarter-final.
Let's look now at the Rugby League World Cup. Fiji has made the semi-finals something its rugby union counterparts have never done and Samoa, Tonga and Ireland have shown genuine improvement. We haven't seen the 100-point thrashings of the last Rugby World Cup tournament.
What do people expect the International Rugby League Federation to do? Scrap the World Cup because Australia is too dominant? The last mob to try that trick was the International Olympic Committee which struck softball off the programme for London 2012 because the United States was invincible. Yet who won the gold medal in Beijing? Japan.
The Rugby League World Cup has created an appetite for more end-of-year international matches. I'd love to see an annual, or two-yearly, Pacific Nations Cup tournament featuring Tonga, Samoa, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand Maori and an Australian Indigenous team with the winner to play the Kiwis. It would be better to watch than the All Blacks v Portugal
League of Its Own
It has become as fashionable as getting legless drunk in Cup Week for sporting cynics to bag the allegedly oxymoronic Rugby League World Cup.
Well, I'm with Wayne Bennett, the Kiwis' technical adviser and Broncos' guru, who said prior to the semi-final: "We have to stop listening to people who say the World Cup isn't working. It is working. The crowds are good, the football has been great and it's going to make a dollar."
Australia's invincibility seems to be the critics' biggest beef. Strangely, many of these same sages love to crow about the All Blacks' peerless test record (between World Cups).
Only two of the 20 teams at last year's Rugby World Cup were capable of winning the title and one only made it as far the quarter-final.
Let's look now at the Rugby League World Cup. Fiji has made the semi-finals something its rugby union counterparts have never done and Samoa, Tonga and Ireland have shown genuine improvement. We haven't seen the 100-point thrashings of the last Rugby World Cup tournament.
What do people expect the International Rugby League Federation to do? Scrap the World Cup because Australia is too dominant? The last mob to try that trick was the International Olympic Committee which struck softball off the programme for London 2012 because the United States was invincible. Yet who won the gold medal in Beijing? Japan.
The Rugby League World Cup has created an appetite for more end-of-year international matches. I'd love to see an annual, or two-yearly, Pacific Nations Cup tournament featuring Tonga, Samoa, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand Maori and an Australian Indigenous team with the winner to play the Kiwis. It would be better to watch than the All Blacks v Portugal
