League, rugby must unite against European incursion

For years I have prophesied about the mouse that would swallow the elephant, rugby union making a meal of rugby league.

Storm’s Marika Koroibete, left, will return to rugby union next season with the Melbourne Rebels.

For years now, I have prophesied about the mouse that would swallow the elephant, rugby union making a meal of rugby league. It’s starting to happen, but not as I anticipated.

I always envisaged rugby coming out on top because it was a global game. Ultimately league’s insularity and parochialism would work against it. The very reason that allowed league to dominate rugby in Australia — that rugby did not have the critical mass to threaten it seriously — would in the end work against it on the world stage.

It was, I confess now, a fairly simple weltanschauung, a world view based on a fairly crude maths and on no level did it take into account the fact that ultimately nations would have to battle to stop themselves from sliding into irrelevancy.

It’s already happening now. Fiji, Samoa and Tonga have virtually become feeder nations for other countries. Initially, it was just the regional powers — New Zealand and Australia — that benefited, but now the Polynesian rugby diaspora is reaching into every corner of the globe.

Imagine how a Rugby World Cup would pan out if played on a State of Origin basis. I suspect three of the quarter-finalists would be Pacific island nations and, frankly, I’m not sure that the All Blacks and the Wallabies would be playing in the final if those rules applied. Certainly you could count out Australia.

Now, cast your mind 20 years into the future. It’s difficult, I know. I very much doubt that had I been asked to do the same thing 20 years ago, at the dawn of professional rugby in 1996, that I would have had much of a clue of how things would be now.

Wasps would have been things to look out for if you went down by the garden shed, Eddie Jones would be coaching — who? And who would have thought that comic books would have driven a rugby revolution in Toulon? So, 2036, it’s almost unimaginable …

The Six Nations, which by then would be played on a promotion-relegation basis, would feature a final — they’d have finals by then, too — between Georgia and England, while at the other end of the table, Wales would be battling Ireland to rejoin the competition.

In the Super-Sized Rugby final, the provincial competition, the Sunwolves would pit their five All Blacks, two Wallabies and three Springboks against the might of San Diego and their foreign legion of star recruits. Even so, they’d had to really fight to get past the Beijing Blockers in the semi-finals. Whatever else you might say about the Chinese, once they took a venture seriously — as they had rugby — they simply threw resources at it until they’d mastered it.

OK, enough of this, as fascinating as it is. Back to the present because the present is scary enough, though perhaps that should read “scarily exciting”. As for the mouse with the huge appetite, the problem is that Australian rugby’s problem has morphed into rugby league’s problem. As more and more rugby players head to Europe for the money, rugby increasingly is turning its attention to making good its number by recruiting from league ranks.

Notice, I haven’t said they are recruiting “league-ies”. In most cases, they’ve merely reclaimed players who started off in rugby, went to league and now for whatever reason — and would you believe it, some of them actually prefer rugby — want to come “home” again.

Hence, it was a little bit precious Melbourne Storm getting so annoyed at losing Marika Koroibete to the Rebels when he had originally been a rugby player. And not just him but Joe Tomane, Eto Nabuli, Caleb Tui and arguably even Karmichael Hunt, although I’m prepared to hear arguments from the defence where he is concerned.

Both Australian rugby and league are attempting to do deals with the devil. Better to let the powerful European and Japanese clubs have a little so they don’t take the lot. So Australian rugby has introduced the Giteau Law and rugby league is toying with the idea of allowing its players to take off-season sabbaticals in Europe. Good luck to them but when you sup with the devil, you have to use an awfully long spoon and, frankly, I don’t think there’s a spoon long enough to keep the Mourad Boudjellals of the world at bay.

The foreign clubs are certain to retaliate by offering players extra money to make themselves unavailable for Test football. World Rugby’s Regulation 9 is in place to prevent clubs from banning their players from Test football. But if the players themselves decide to do that — and it’s amazing what an extra $200,000 on the contract can do — there is nothing Australian rugby can do about it. And that’s precisely what will happen when the new TV broadcast comes into play for the English premiership in 2018 and clubs are operating on a salary cap of $20 million as opposed to $14m.

As for the NRL, the idea of exposing players to the money on offer in European rugby, even just for sabbaticals, is merely inviting them to stay over there. When the word spreads that you can earn two and three times as much in Europe, the sabbaticals solution put forward by the Storm’s football director Frank Ponissi this week could come in time to be seen as a trojan horse.

In the horse race of life, always put your money on self interest. That was former Waratahs boss Greg Harris’s favourite saying and it certainly applies here. The self-interest of both rugby codes involves working together. As the politicians might say, the things that divide us are less important than what unites us.

So will the two rugby codes join forces. Will they merge?

It’s doubtful. When you think of all the infrastructure propping up the NRL and Super Rugby, you do wonder how on earth they could be rationalised into one competition. And yes, rugby league would offer a wealth of backs but as for forwards ... well, there just aren’t enough Brad Thorns in the world.

Still, the world is becoming ugly and aggressive and if the Australian rugby codes don’t hang together, they will, as Benjamin Franklin warned, surely hang separately.

As for a merger in the next 20 years — the odds are probably better than you would have got in 1996 on Eddie Jones coaching England!