Opinion
Why a guy with a sax gets more airtime than five successful NRL clubs
by Malcolm Knox
Sports columnist
March 6, 2020 — 11.10am
Drawn in like a moth to the flames of controversy around the National Rugby League’s promotional advertisement for the 2020 season, I was expecting images of Latrell Mitchell dancing on a burning Australian flag amid scenes of wild lesbian abandon. Political correctness not so much gone mad as gone on an end-of-season footy trip. To the thudding backbeat of league dinosaurs keeling over and hitting the floor.
It turned out to be much more interesting.
With these campaigns a sport is revealing the values it wishes to project. It is telling us what it thinks of itself – or in league’s case, what it is trying very hard to think of itself. The two-minute video has been equally praised and criticised for wearing its progressive colours on it sleeve, showing Mitchell wrapped in the Aboriginal flag, Karina Brown and Vanessa Foliaki kissing after an Origin game, and Macklemore singing
Same Love at the 2017 grand final. There is a bookend story of generations of kids inspired by the game, even if Tina Turner’s
Simply the Best…Still…Again…Really?’ carries a tacit admission that in 30 years the code has yet to come up with a musical advance on that weary grandmother of all soundtracks.
When the 116-second ad is broken down into its 42 scenes, some uncomfortable anomalies emerge. The Brown-Foliaki kiss and Macklemore occupy a combined two seconds. The total exposure given to the women’s game, through a vignette of Ali Brigginshaw, is six seconds. Yet two glimpses of "social engineering" and transgressions of the "Go woke, go broke" rule, which take up less space than archival shots of Tina and some random guy playing a saxophone, were enough to give old men heart attacks.
If they want something to worry about, they should not be looking at what was put into the ad, but what was left out.
Inclusion first. Of the NRL’s 16 clubs, the serious airtime goes to South Sydney and Newcastle. Souths remain the pride of the league in this concoction. Here are the Souths fans marching in 2000 to get their team back (from the same NRL that kicked them out – what a masterstroke!). And here is the reborn Rabbitoh Latrell Mitchell, his somewhat confused tantrum with the Roosters transformed into a symbolism to tug on the strings of the uncommitted heart. The long image of Mitchell standing in the water, wrapped in the flag, with a girl singing about how he’s better than all the rest, is the advertisement’s money shot. This is the NRL saying it is better than the AFL, which, far from turning Adam Goodes into a hero, turned its back. It’s a brave gambit in its way, not entirely credible but a conversation starter, which is what the league will have wanted.
Newcastle are celebrated through their win in 1997 when BHP was pulling out of town, an ersatz revival of rugby league’s working-class origins. It’s a manufactured nostalgia, given what has happened to the Knights since. Tellingly, the other Newcastle clip is of Andrew Johns returning home after the 2001 grand final, the party already having started. Twenty years on, the Knights’ hangover persists.
If we’re keeping score of airtime, Souths and Newcastle top the table with 14 seconds’ exposure each. The two clubs on the next echelon, with eight seconds, are Manly and Canberra, curious choices perhaps, but again purely symbolic. The Sea Eagles are the Trbojevic brothers, meaning league is about family. It’s a surprise to think of Manly, that never-ending feud, as a family club, but if Tom can be shown in the ad playing backyard footy during the Super League split in mid-1996, before he was born, then anything is possible. As for the Raiders, there is a moment of Charnze Nicoll-Klokstad in the gym with Jarrod Croker and a split-second of Mal, but they’re there for the Viking clap: it’s a fans’ game. Notably, the Viking crowd are in a street, not a stadium. Most other fans portrayed in the ad are in pubs (and most of those, in these pubs, are women). The game’s significant moments are seen on TV sets. All of which is to glide past the empty stands each weekend and acknowledge that rugby league is, in its heart, a television sport.
So that’s what’s in. What, and who, is out?
Rugby league – the game – is out. Of the 116 seconds in this ad, just 14 seconds are given to the jewel in the NRL’s crown, the players in action. That bare minimum of football is reduced to iconic moments worn out by overuse: the Scott Sattler tackle in the 2003 grand final, the Benji Marshall flick pass in 2005, the Johnathan Thurston field goal in 2015. It’s league for people who have a passing interest in league.
Normally, season-opening campaigns are about giving a nod to the fans of all the clubs, but this one is conspicuous for how many clubs are virtually cut out. That long shot of Latrell Mitchell standing in the water takes more airtime than is given to Melbourne, the Roosters, the Bulldogs, the Panthers, the Broncos, the Eels, the Sharks and the Dragons
combined. The Warriors and Titans get five seconds of old footage between them. The Eels get three seconds of Clint Gutherson and Mitchell Moses in a dark tunnel. The Broncos and Sharks get a split-second each of podium celebration. The Roosters, repeat premiers, are on screen for just two seconds, and half of that is an Arthur Beetson mural. The Dragons get three seconds of Tyson Frizell training and a subliminal flash of Ben Hornby raising the 2010 premiership trophy. The poor old Dogs? One second of people (in a pub, of course) watching Hazem El Masri break the pointscoring record in 2009. That takes longer to read than the Bulldogs actually get in the ad.
Five of the six most supported clubs in the NRL are given less exposure than the guy playing the sax.
What does this mean? For all the storytelling about inclusion, it’s the exclusions that tell the story. The NRL is telling us what it doesn’t want to celebrate. By excluding its three most successful clubs of the past 30 years – Brisbane, Melbourne, Roosters – it blanks out the abject failure of the salary cap system. By excluding the Warriors and Titans, it skirts past the ruin of its expansion ambitions. By excluding its heartland in western and southern Sydney, and by excluding game action – the athleticism, the skill and also the violence - it draws attention to a deep ambivalence about itself, how it doesn’t seem quite to know what to do with the core of what it is. The advertisement, then, accidentally provides a perfect snapshot of the NRL in 2020: leading the field on identity politics and reconciliation, but still struggling to reconcile itself with its identity.
