“THREE tournaments, 14 nations, 26 teams, 53 matches, 31 days – the most competitive, ambitious and anticipated Rugby League World Cup will be played across three countries and nine host cities.”
That was the first sentence of the media release put out jointly on Sunday by International Rugby League, the governing body of the game worldwide, and the Australian Rugby League Commission.
Will next year’s World Cup, now that at last we know the format and the fixtures, live up to that hype description?
I hope so.
And I hope the men’s tournament is significantly better, with bigger crowds, than we have seen for the most recent World Cups held in Australia, in 2008 and 2017.
To be fair to the Australians, the administration of the game down under is vastly different today compared to what it was even eight years ago and I would be amazed if they couldn’t do a much better job of selling tickets and creating a positive vibe to encourage supporters to want to watch matches in the tournament.
However, if I were to be critical, I would say that the World Cup has a format that is hard to justify and that some of the matches that have been scheduled seem somewhat out of place.
The tournament will begin in Sydney on 15th October with Australia facing New Zealand, almost certainly in front a a full house at Allianz Stadium for a match that many will expect to see repeated at Suncorp Stadium in World Cup Final exactly a month later.
Australia and New Zealand are in a four-nation group with Fiji and the Cook Islands, and it is easy to forecast some one-sided scorelines in that group.
I do get the feeling that the World Cup organisers have tried to manufacture a system that will deliver the four highest ranked nations into the semi-finals, which would be Australia, New Zealand, England and Samoa.
If that is their aim it is certainly helped by England not facing any of the other three leading nations in the pool stage, while the same also goes for Samoa.
England’s opponents will be Tonga, France and Papua New Guinea in that order.
The organisers have helped us by scheduling our first two games for Perth, while our third game against the Kumuls is not scheduled for the hothouse of Port Moresby, but instead in the relative backwater of Wollongong, where the Papuans will be expected to offer much less of a challenge than if they were playing in front of their own supporters.
The French are nothing like as lucky as we are, having their first game in Sydney against Samoa and then travelling across the continent to face England in Perth before playing Lebanon in a rather surprising double header in Sydney as a curtain raiser to the clash between Samoa and Tonga.
That doesn’t make much sense to me.
Given that Samoa and Tonga recently attracted a crowd of almost 45,000 in Brisbane for their Pacific Cup game, I would have thought that a repeat of that game on the opening weekend would have helped reinforce the message that the World Cup is going to be a major tournament.
Surely if England are to play France in Perth, it would have been far more sensible for that to be the opening fixture there, to avoid the expense of excessive travel across the continent.
As far as I’m aware, Perth isn’t noted for having a large Tongan population, so surely it would have been better to see England playing the Tongans either in Sydney or in Auckland, where we could guarantee a massive crowd wearing the Tongan colours, as we saw in 2017.
In fact there are no games scheduled for Auckland, but there is one match in New Zealand, which will be in Christchurch at the newly built stadium in that city when the Kiwis face the Cook Islands on 25th October.
That stadium is the potential home of a 20th NRL club at some point in the future but it seems an odd game to take there.
So those are my gripes on an initial reading of the World Cup schedule.
I would still have preferred a tournament with 16 nations, with four seeded groups of four with entries from all the major continents to give the tournament a truly world feel.
But I suppose we’ll have to wait for that.
Magic Weekend set for Everton – and somewhere in France
THE Magic Weekend now looks certain to be played at Everton’s Hill Dickinson Stadium some time in July, with the twelve English Super League teams taking part, while the two French teams will have a separate game at a French venue that is yet to be decided.
The financial demands made by Everton are apparently significantly lower than those made by the owners of Newcastle United and the RFL will be banking on the Everton stadium still having a ‘wow’ factor among potential supporters, particularly those who were not able to purchase tickets for the second Ashes Test, while those who did attend that game will hopefully want to be there again.
I’m sure it will be a great weekend and it will be interesting to see where the two French teams choose to play their game in France.
Perhaps they could even take a game to Spain.
Broncos make a statement
ANYONE who doubted the seriousness of Darren Lockyer’s and Grant Wechsel’s aim of turning the London Broncos into one of the biggest clubs in the game would surely have to revise their opinion after the club’s move into the Hazelwood Centre in Sunbury on Thames.
The facility is quite possibly better than any other Super League club’s and it puts down a marker for all of us that the Broncos will be a club to be reckoned with in future.
Gary Hetherington deserves enormous credit for bringing Darren and Grant on board and I suspect the club has a fair chance of winning all its matches in the Championship next year before hopefully joining Super League in 2027.