Asgardian13 wrote:
You may not like the country-swapping, but to some extent it goes on on many sports. It does not mean that international RL is a 'farce'. Anyone who saw the best matches at this World Cup - and I was fortunate to be at several of them - can see what a vibrant, exciting spectacle is international RL. I doubt I will ever experience again anything close to the atmosphere at the England v Tonga match. In the Auckland press the next day, one of their sports writers described it as 'better than any All Blacks test in recent memory'. I'll take that kind of 'farce' any day.
1. It may go on in other sports, but in those cases it makes a farce of that sport too, be it Union or Cricket or anything else......and as far as I am aware, the vast majority of dual nation reps in Cricket and Union are cases of players at the end of their careers, not at the peak of their abilities.....Tonga, New Zealand, then back to Tonga is just plain stupid when talking about possibly the best forward currently playing the sport and it makes the game look amateurish.....and that's how it was portrayed by the vast majority of the Kiwi Press during the tournament.
2. I too was at the England v Tonga game, as well as the NZ v Tonga game.....both were fantastic and both had better atmospheres than any other game of Rugby of either codes I have witnessed but the reality is that New Zealand v Tonga featured 30 Kiwis, a pair of Aussies and 2 Tongans........the #4 to the #7th ranked RLIF sides had a total of 13 home born players out of the 92 players at the RLWC.....no amount of media hyperbole makes Rugby League any more international than 3 major nations populating all the other sides other than 2nd tier France and PNG.
2012 will see 16 sides.........368 players....how many of the players other than in the squads for NZ, Aus, England, PNG and France will be heritage players?
11 squads of 23 players is 253........this time it was 9 squads of 23 and of the 207 I believe there were about 34 non-heritage players...16%.......the rest came from 2 Nations.
No amount of gushing over the crowds at a stadium less than 2km's away from the largest Tongan population concentration in the world (yes...more Tongans in south Auckland than Tonga) will change the fact that the teams ranked #2, #4, #5, #6, #7 have no meaningful domestic competitions.
I am over-critical of the Australian organisers and fans for not promoting this RLWC at all, but the reality is that the Aussies don't buy into the "need" for the game to be considered an international sport and until we have domestic comps supplying the players for their respective international sides then we will be regarded as tin-pot.
I live in New Zealand and I can assure you that whilst the atmosphere at the Tonga games was spectacular, across the nation, nobody really bothered with the competition...a 12k crowd for a world cup QF in Wellington featuring the Kiwis tells you all you need to know about how ANZACS treat International RL...but if you're still not convinced, compare the crowd sizes to the RLWC Final in 2017 to the Union International friendly in the same stadium 42 days earlier.......it's depressing but it is how things are.
HOW MANY TIMES?????
