However the NRL survives coronavirus shutdown, the game can be rebuilt better than ever
Is it too early for silver linings? The full wounds of the NRL’s shutdown are not yet known – but peer through the gloom and this could be a chance to reshape the competition, writes ROBERT CRADDOCK.
Opinion
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It was a sight we have never seen in modern sport – a football code gearing up to step back in time.
You sense that by the time rugby league fully rises again – and it will because it always does – it will be more like the 1980s-90s scene where players are paid well without being overindulged, where skinny coaching departments work hard for not a lot, where the volunteers are a key cog.
As colleague Phil Rothfield reports and commission chairman Peter V’landys hinted, rugby league can never go back to what it was.
Staff will be cut, budgets trimmed, belts tightened. It’s started already and the viciousness of the cullings tells its own story of how short on cash the game is.
The strong will survive. The weak will perish.
The financial cycle will be brutal because almost every club revenue source – from tickets to television money – will have dried up.
As Ben Ikin said on NRL 360, clubs will have nowhere to hide. Everyone’s books must be transparent.
Amid the ruins of one of the most traumatic days in the sport’s history lay the seeming inconsequential matter of the second rugby league team in Brisbane.
When the entire competition is fighting for survival and sinking beneath the waves the last thing you think about is expansion.
But then the further you peered into the gloom the more you wondered whether this might be the chance to reshape the competition, find suitors with new money and big dreams and refresh a competition which had been living on bygone deeds and beyond its means.
Maybe this is actually a time for new blood and a complete reset.
It might be Brisbane. It might be somewhere else but no forest is ever the same after a bushfire that wipes out everything in its path.
The days of players earning a million dollars a season to play before crowds of 11,000 people are set to be replaced a payment scale more tuned to reality.
Rugby league’s call to suspend the season came later than it should have and there was a sense over the past few days that their powerbrokers were like that boxer who knows he is heading for a loss and comes out swinging from the rafters.
But in fairness to them the future of the entire code was at stake so, in a typical rugby league sort of way, they rolled the sleeves up and got stuck in.
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Rugby league may be suspended but the battle to save the code is just getting started.
V’landys said the code would consider moving the entire competition to North Queensland but every move is doused with danger.
The New Zealand Warriors were only in Australia for less than two weeks yet they acutely felt the strain of being away from their families at a time of such communal distress.
League players are not renowned travellers. The thought of them spending many weeks on end away from their families at a time when the world is in crisis does not make a lot of sense.
But these are desperate times … and the tsunami has not even hit the shore.
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