Another NRL season preview? It’s what the punditry is pimping at this time of year – tales chock full of predictions (what might be more aptly described as “guesses”) about what the 2019 season holds for the myriad actors in Australian rugby league.
What we do know is this: rugby league always delivers action. It’s athletic, fast and brutal, and its players display incredible levels of skill under the pressure of impending pain. Players can be physically ill before running out. That’s quite a game: playing despite being scared of it.
Rugby league declares itself “the greatest game of all” but it clearly is not. That would be golf, or boules, or kabaddi. The greatest game is whatever you’re into. If the greatest game was measured by objective metrics it would be football or cricket or, say, table tennis or whatever game is played and consumed by the most human beings. And it would provoke typically tiresome argument.
What’s interesting is that rugby league, for all its declarations of primacy, only half-believes it is the greatest game of all. For in its heart, league knows its place. It knows it’s a little slugger out there doing its best. The slogan points more to the game’s insecurity. “Simply The Best” wasn’t just a jingle – it was league telling the world and itself that it’s better than others, even if it’s not entirely sure. The game is nothing if not combative.
It is also great. The ball is in play for most of the 80 minutes. There are clocks designed to speed the ball back into action after stoppages. Rules are tweaked each year to increase the percentage of in-play-action. Which is a good thing on one hand, or bad if you like scrums. League did away with scrums long ago in favour of ritual handovers. Proponents of this – which is just about everyone rusted onto rugby league – point to more ball “in play”, as if scrummaging isn’t actual play but rather bloodied oafs performing an ugly, weird dance.
Along with scrums, rugby league brushed all other “messy” ambiguity – what other codes of football call competition for the ball – and now outside the coin-toss or what a referee calls a “loose carry” or a “strip” in the tackle, play is effectively one team’s turn to attack followed by the other team’s turn to attack. And repeat (set).
And what attack there can be. Because there is plenty of in-play-action, league players are multi-skilled. There are guys with a role, a mandate, to play a certain way, to do one thing – there are forwards and even backs who are instructed not to pass – but most are big, strong athletes who can run fast and pass. Most are Boyd Cordner. And one is Kalyn Ponga.
The 20-year-old Newcastle Knights fullback-come-five-eighth is so prodigiously skilled he ran out in his first State of Origin last year and almost won it for Queensland. Pundits wondered why it took the Maroons so long to throw him in. The Maroons must wonder also; they erred on the conservative side and couldn’t see a 19-year-old thriving in the cauldron, but they didn’t look hard enough.
Now he’s playing yin to Mitchell Pearce’s finely-tuned yang, and with mighty David Klemmer running flat stick into his opponents and gifting his halves time to do their thing against bruised back-peddlers, the Knights are a shot at the finals for the first time in recent memory.
League always presents these people. When Greg Inglis was 19 he won the Clive Churchill medal. When Billy Slater was 20 he scored an Origin try of such skill at speed that it turned and burned Anthony Minichiello and saw Ray Warren’s larynx ratchet up through all the octaves. Rugby league has always had something of the carnival about it, and these people are its major drawcards.
And they keep on coming. Outside Ponga, the Gold Coast Titans have a tasty one in AJ Brimson. Then there is Canberra Raiders wing man Nick Cotric and the thunderous young talent David Fifita, all players to watch out for this coming season.
For consistent high-octane action, for entertainment, for powerful, athletic people running at one another and leaping over lines like electrified trout, kabaddi always delivers. So too does rugby league.
