If NRL boss Dave Smith is to fill the billion-dollar black hole of the next broadcast deal, he needs to fix something quite important ? the game.
Three players being promptly cleared of shoulder charge offences at the judiciary on Wednesday night highlighted the calamity.
For three years, the NRL has wrestled with this issue. Three years. Yet it still can't work out the difference between a "shoulder charge" and a "shoulder collision".
AFL is best watched at the ground, but rugby league remains the perfect television product. It won't be, however, unless some fundamental change happens between the sidelines.
The jury is still out to lunch and deep into a three-day bender as it argues if Smith has made the right call in signing a $925m broadcast deal with Channel Nine for four matches from 2018, with the other billion to come from other media.
That shock announcement raised the middle finger to Fox Sports, and at the same time embarrassed and angered one of the most influential men on the planet.
Channelling Montgomery Burns from The Simpsons, News Corp supremo Rupert Murdoch smacked down rugby league and Smith when he bizarrely fronted the announcement of the AFL's $2.508 billion broadcast deal in Melbourne on Tuesday.
The Empire strikes back. And how.
Murdoch's claim that his company had "always preferred Aussie Rules" has raised all the eyebrows, not least because it rewrites history. (Er, Super League? Hello?)
But this from News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson could not have been clearer: "Our intention is to make it [the AFL] even greater. It's an influential game and we intend to make it even more influential by complementing a wonderful sport with the powerful platforms we have in this country, and that includes the power of print as well as the depth of digital."
Thomson then added that News Corp ? which owns Fox Sports and is half-owner of Foxtel with Telstra ? would be pushing AFL in the rugby league heartlands of NSW and Queensland because "there is obviously a growth opportunity because this is a wonderful game".
Just how many readers would buy The Daily Telegraph and The Courier-Mail with scant rugby league coverage would be interesting, but the general translation is this: we will starve the game of relevance, because we can.
Thomson is an AFL and Essendon tragic, and close to former Bombers coach James Hird, who has previously described Thomson as "a great friend and mentor to me".
If the hard talk was supposed to spook Smith, the word out of NRL headquarters is that it didn't. He was expecting to be whacked back, although this was a thunderous right cross.
The fact remains, though, that without NRL matches Fox Sports is half a network. Without live rugby league, how many already jaded Foxtel subscribers would ask for a disconnection?
There is two years left to run on the current broadcast deal, giving Smith plenty of time to break bread with Mr Burns.
But Smith and the NRL will only be in a position of strength if it urgently repairs a game that is increasingly difficult to watch.
At 4pm last Sunday, I came to crossroads of my life. Netball or rugby league?
Instead of watching the Bulldogs against the Titans on Nine, I watched the Diamonds sweep to victory in the Netball World Cup final against New Zealand on Ten.
Rugby league administrators need to realise the game is becoming mind-numbingly frustrating to watch. There's a sprinkling of cracking games, although many are not.
Those who apply the rules of the game send mixed messages.
The game's commentariat has simplified the shoulder charge discussion down to this: players are doing to die ? or the game has gone soft. The judiciary has now made it as clear as mud.
The crackdown on wrestling techniques has been promised for years. As we saw on Monday night, as the Storm entangled themselves in the legs of Sharks players, they are hollow threats.
Meanwhile, referees will penalise defenders who have taken a nanosecond too long to get out of a tackle, but other players grab a ball carrier's leg, further slowing down the ruck with impunity.
Forward passes? Jesus wept. Short balls out of dummy half are often passed diagonally forward? but beautiful, spiralling cut-outs that hit the chest of a winger at speed are immediately pulled up.
In other news, shot clocks will be trialled in under-20s matches this weekend to stop time-wasting at scums and line drop-outs.
An idea: to improve the speed and flow of the game, we could limit the video referee to whether a try has been scored instead of every single 50-50 decision on the field. Let's leave that to the four officials in the middle.
Speaking of those officials, when two players start to "play fight", grabbing at each others jumpers and making really angry faces, and then every player runs in, there's no need to stop the clock, bring the players out, and their respective captains, and then tell them not to "play fight" anymore.
There's at least 10 minutes that can be saved per game, right there.
Last year, I said in this space that the game is a mess. Not much has changed, as the game applies band-aids to the wounds.
"You've got to give it to Dave Smith ? he's got balls," said one media heavyweight last Monday after the Nine deal was trumpeted.
We're about to learn how big they are. But to get the remaining billion, he needs to fix the game.
Read more:
http://www.smh.com.au/rugby-league/...gby-league-20150820-gj3ful.html#ixzz3jP1sbKCY
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