And the winner is … Brisbane! And Darwin! And Melbourne and Perth and Christchurch and the fine, hot capital of Papua New Guinea, Port Moresby, which will play host to three Tests in the 2017 Rugby League World Cup. And it should be really quite good. Unless you’d like to see a decent game in Sydney. In which case, you get stiffed.
Well, not entirely. The Lebanon versus Australia pool game at Allianz Stadium should be pretty good, if a tad one-sided. And England versus Lebanon at the same venue should be full of backpackers and local Lebanese league types, and … yes, it also should be quite good.
But they’re not exactly marquee match-ups.
Sydney people, who for so long have taken it for granted that world class events would lob in their lap simply by dint of the city’s population, have been awarded just two, relatively innocuous pool games. And there’s been some navel-gazing about it.
Yet what do you expect, oh gleaming, Emerald City? It’s Sydney’s fault. People don’t travel. There are eastern suburbs types who only half-joke about not going west of Anzac Parade and folks on the northern beaches who claim they never cross the Spit Bridge. Only the most rusted-on fans will leave their suburban pods and venture out into the night to sit in traffic and pay huge overs for parking, and then sit in traffic again, and get home at midnight, and experience all the other myriad annoyances that make it a pain to watch live sport in Sydney.
But you can’t blame them. The transport infrastructure is terrible. The Olympic-sized mega-dome is a soulless boulevard of broken dreams. And the denizens have so many more world-class entertainment options – including live coverage on the box.
And thus, even in a city of 4.29 million people, World Cup organisers couldn’t guarantee that ANZ Stadium would be full for the final. How can that be?
Other cities have been chosen to host the premier fixtures – Darwin will host a quarter-final, so will Christchurch. Hamilton has 150,000 people and as many matches as Sydney. Cairns and Townsville have one more each. Melbourne and Brisbane have the semis. And the latter, capital of the state ever more considered the “heartland” of league in Australia, has the final at its brilliant Suncorp Stadium.
And that is as it should be. And Sydney will have to get used to the fact that important people don’t consider spending money to lure such games to Sydney to be a good use of tax-payers’ money. The investment doesn’t warrant the return.
And here we are, again, rolling about in another of rugby league’s surprisingly news-worthy “venues and scheduling” imbroglios. What is it about these things that gets folks so het-up?
There is an argument that a game should have gone to Sydney’s west. Penrith chief executive Corey Payne wrote that he is “extremely disappointed that we have been snubbed by the NRL for ‘commercial reasons’”. Payne contends that not taking a Test match to Penrith is “a mind-boggling decision which makes me question the NRL’s strategic agenda for Australia’s fastest growing economy and population”.
“Our backyard is the growth engine of Australia, a burgeoning infrastructure capital and home to the third largest economy in the country,” he said. “The region is a showpiece for multiculturalism in Australia.”
And all that may be true. But they rarely fill Penrith’s stadium for matches featuring Penrith. And “commercial reasons” are a pretty big marker in commercial sport. And, again, what does Sydney expect? Game three of rugby league’s ultimate showcase, State of Origin, attracted but 61,000. And that was considered quite a few considering it was cold and a dead rubber, and played at ANZ. But it was far from full.
And if you have a World Cup final that’s far from full it would not be a “good look”. And rugby league’s marketeers would hate that. It leaves them open to hurtful teasing from their rivals for Australians’ entertainment expenditure. What? You can’t fill the stadium for the World Cup final of your sport? What is wrong with you, rugby league?
And thus the final will be in Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium. And it will be full. And it’ll be great there. And Sydney can suck it up.
