Last hurrahs for league's dying breed
By Mike Carlton
October 4, 2003
"Yeh, mate, grand finals are different, mate. There are two teams out there, mate, and only one can win. So ya gotta lift a level, mate.
"Like, y'know, mate, there'll be a fantastic atmosphere out there, mate, but it's a game of two halves so anything can happen.
"But me and the blokes will do what we gotta do, mate, and at the end of the day, it'll be the team with the most points what wins."
There is something pleasantly familiar about the rituals of the rugby league grand final. Nothing changes. It comes around in due turn, like those other reassuring Australian festivals: the Royal Easter Show, the Archibald Prize, Anzac Day, the Melbourne Cup. The familiar cliches are unwrapped and hung out again, like Christmas decorations.
Yet cold common sense tells you that rugby league is slowly dying. Saying so will enrage its fans, who will bombard me with emails about rah-rah toffs in tweed jackets with leather patches.
But the game is now a peculiar and obscure beastie isolated in a tiny corner of the world, like the giant tortoise of the Galapagos Islands.
For proof of this, look no further than the coming Kangaroo tour to Britain.
Once, league players would fall over themselves for the honour of wearing the Australian green and gold in Leeds and Wigan. Now they are falling over themselves to be "unavailable".
Contrast this to the Rugby World Cup, the world's biggest sporting event this year. In time, league will fade and fold back into union, and Australia will be unbeatable. But it will take a while yet.
