NO ONE can deny that the FIFA Women’s World Cup, held in Australia and New Zealand, which came to a climax on Sunday when Spain defeated England 1-0 in the final, was an outstanding success on a far greater scale than anyone had expected beforehand.
Our sympathies go to the Lionesses, who played valiantly throughout the tournament, but couldn’t quite get over the final hurdle as Spain were worthy winners.
But at least they defeated Australia in the semi-final, which of course was very satisfying for those of us who relish clashes between England and Australia in any sporting context.
But are there any lessons for Rugby League to learn from the Women’s World Cup?
It seems to me that there are three major lessons we need to take on board.
First, the quality of play is not really important.
No one can doubt that the quality of football we have just witnessed in the World Cup was well below what we saw in the Men’s World Cup a few months ago.
But that didn’t matter.
Because the second lesson is that people will turn up in vast numbers to watch competitive international matches.
The key word, however, is ‘competitive’.
Unfortunately, the Rugby League World Cup last year had far too many one-sided matches in which the outcome was clear well before the end of the game.
And that brings us onto my last point.
When you have a World Cup tournament that you know is going to be tightly contested, money spent on marketing the tournament is invariably money well spent, especially in a country like Australia, which is a multicultural society with expatriates from many of the countries that were competing in the tournament.
The World Cup has done an enormous amount for women’s football and for women’s sport in general.
But the problem for us is finding a tournament format that includes at least 16 nations that wouldn’t result in the sort of scorelines we saw in our World Cup last year.
The Rugby League World Cup last year gave us a wonderful opportunity to increase the support for our sport, but unfortunately it appears to have failed dismally.
The contrast with the FIFA Women’s World Cup was stark.
That tournament gave us a lesson in how to organise and promote an international competition.
Goodbye, Parky
Michael Parkinson was a legendary broadcaster and, more specifically, a superb interviewer of a kind we don’t see on TV these days.
The miner’s son from Cudworth, near Barnsley, was a natural for the job when he started his series of programmes in the early seventies, interviewing everyone from the most famous film stars to leading politicians.
Parkinson was a great friend of former RFL Chief Executive Maurice Lindsay and when Maurice ran the game, he would often attend the Challenge Cup Final, although he rarely spoke about Rugby League on his chat show.
One of the few times Rugby League did get a mention was when he interviewed the famous actress Diana Rigg in the 1970s and she mentioned going to a match at Headingley. But the conversation didn’t stay on Rugby League for very long.
My only interaction with Parkinson came in the late 1990s, when he was hosting a Radio 5 show on a Friday evening and he used to preview some of the sporting action at the weekend.
It was when rugby union had just turned professional and I appeared on the show at the end of a telephone to debate the merits of the two codes of rugby with Stephen Jones, the Sunday Times rugby union correspondent, who was well known for his antipathy towards Rugby League.
Jones inevitably tried to claim that League was a boring game with five drives and a kick, with all the players being of an identical size, whereas rugby union was a game for all shapes and sizes.
To Parky’s obvious amusement, I then agreed with Jones and pointed out how Billy Bunter could always get a game in a rugby union front row, where most of the players actually looked like him.
I could feel Jones almost explode in the studio and Parky had to calm him down.
Unfortunately, I was never invited on again.
Sunday afternoon at Headingley
To see more than 15,000 people at Headingley on a Sunday afternoon, even though I wasn’t actually at the ground, is a perfect illustration of what summer rugby was supposed to be all about.
Why don’t more Super League clubs play matches on summer Sunday afternoons, or even Saturday afternoons, as we saw Leigh hosting Catalans on Saturday?
I’ll never understand why so many clubs insist on playing on Friday evenings, particularly when they are up against televised matches.
Book of the year
My thanks to all the people who have reacted to our recent innovation of the Rugby League Podcast, in which Jake Kearnan and I discuss the latest events in Rugby League.
We record it on Tuesday afternoon and it goes online on Wednesday morning.
It’s easy to find on the usual podcast channels – Spotify and YouTube, for example – if you want to watch or listen to it.
This week we will have a special guest, Richard de la Riviere, who will talk about his new book, ’50 Wigan Legends in Their Own Words’.
The book will be published on 1st September and it will be on sale at Wigan that night before the Warriors’ game against Salford Red Devils.
Check the advert on page 29 of this issue for details of the book.
I think I can guarantee that Rugby League fans of all stripes will thoroughly enjoy reading this superb new book.
