Michael Batson

According to the game’s commentators, rugby league is apparently all about banana kicks and nullifying the physicality of the opposition, or something like that.

The Rugby League Four-Nations is about to take place in Australia and New Zealand from October until November 2010 featuring the host nations, England, and the 2009 Pacific Cup winners Papua New Guinea.

League is played by some of the smallest nations on Earth, so small in fact, that at a recent “world cup” held in Britain, it was said that should every national from some of those countries competing were to enter the stadium turnstiles they’d fail to fill the entire stadium.

Globally, league is challenged, but regionally too. So much so that in New Zealand the “New Zealand” Warriors, the country’s only fully-professionally league team which competes in Australia’s National Rugby League (NRL) is only identified with Auckland, in the country’s north, the Aussies apparently incapable of differentiating the difference.

Internationally there are many codes of “football”. Whether these sports qualify descriptively as football was outlined by Australia’s SBS chief football commentator, Craig Foster, when he described a simple parameter, “Do the majority of the players kick or handle the ball the majority of the time?” If, like in AFL, League and Union the players handle the ball most of the time, then it’s a handball code. Association football, from where the term “soccer” is derived, however, is a game where the players do not use their hands hardly at all.

Gridiron, or American football (the NFL) in America doesn’t qualify. The Americans lifted the name “football” from those countries that actually play the game or worthier versions of it. Most guys on the field in NFL never touch the ball, let alone kick it and are therefore disqualified. Ricki Ellis, a Kiwi, played for years with the championship San Francisco 49’ers. He freely admitted that during his several seasons he only touched the ball three times whilst actually on the field.

I’d argue that the only the form of the game worthy of the title “football” and that’s the beautiful game, the rest are just pretending. Long-time correspondent for Newsweek and conservative pundit, George F Will, once described American football as illustrating the two worst aspects of US life – long committee meetings punctuated by sporadic violence!”

New Zealand and to a certain extent Australian sports media directors suffer from the illusion that commentators are made not born, hence New Zealand’s drive into hiring ex-players for their thoughts, almost a contradiction in terms. Though some players have thoughts, it’s fair to say that even less are capable of articulating them in any meaningful manner that’s capable of engaging their audience.

Some are hired to stand on the touch line and report on which way the wind is blowing, which apparently in oval ball codes is critical to the outcome of the match. In New Zealand, Aussie Jason Costigan is brought over from Australia to comment on the Warriors’ home games there seemingly being no one capable of doing the job on this side of the Tasman.

Unfortunately, Costigan confuses quantity with quality and adds his own peculiar vocabulary to the proceedings. The ball, usually referred to by Australia’s channel nine commentators as the football, becomes the “pill” with Costigan, or, the Steedman, after the ball’s manufacturer.

Like many a commentator, he doesn’t know the value of a good silence, something cricket’s famous voice the late John Arlott knew only too well. League’s most recognized voice in Ray “Rabbit” Warren, can manage to bring some gravitas to the occasion but all too often is let down by those he has to work with, the ex-players and coaches.

A couple of seasons ago, Rugby and League commentators discovered the verb, “to nullify”, and promptly demonstrated their newly acquired verbal verbosity every weekend.  Another term quickly adopted was the ‘banana kick,’ which they apply when the ball is struck off the side of the boot. Unfortunately by doing so, they demonstrate, to anyone familiar with the round-ball code, their ignorance of the technique.

A banana kick is where the ball deviates in mid-air, like a ‘banana,’ a la David Beckham or Roberto Carlos, the current most famous exponents of a technique, long mastered in soccer. Simply kicking a ball off the side of the foot so that it travels in a straight line, is not a banana kick. 

This year it’s all about physicality. Barely a game goes by without mention of the word. So much so that even the players have picked up on it and when interviewed drop the word into any response when describing the game, the opposition, or their intended tactics.

To be fair the players demonstrate a fair share of athleticism and versatility, with some being capable of playing in more than one position. One or two are reasonable ball players but the game is wholly two-dimensional with very little depth. Largely the talent seems to reside with those blessed with a certain physiological accident of birth, that being they are big and fast. For some players their sole task is to run up to the opposition with ball-in-hand where they are then thumped to the ground by up to three or four of their opposite numbers. Fast-paced, league can be entertaining, but even then the game is broken up by a new phenomenon, the video replay, with referees seemingly reluctant to make a call on most scoring attempts put down over the line.

Rugby union, to quote one historian, is a game played by some small nations and some minorities in a few larger countries. This is even more true of rugby league.

League in Australia is favoured in the eastern states with AFL dominated in the southern and western regions of the country. Here and there the odd team has been transplanted, like the Sydney Swans in AFL who came from South Melbourne and the Brisbane Lions who came from Fitzroy in inner Melbourne. League manufactured the Melbourne Storm to give the game some profile in AFL-dominated Melbourne but mostly their followers are ex-pat Kiwis or interstate Aussies.

Melburnians have yet to fully take to league and may never will. The game is often described as “a load of fat blokes running into a load of other fat blokes” given the game’s linear composition with tow opposing teams facing each other across a ten-metre strip of turf that moves up and down the ground as the field position changes.

In New Zealand it tends to be the coal mining areas where the game is most prevalent, such as near Huntly in the Waikato, or on the west coast of the south island. The game is much favoured by Maori and Polynesians. To kick off the Four Nations and as a warm-up for the tournament, New Zealand played Samoa in Auckland in front of a near sell-out at Mt. Smart stadium, a conundrum then, that a crowd of over 20,000 will watch such an encounter but at the local level teams barely attract a couple of hundred.

In it’s country of origin, league is known as the M62 game, due to the fact that most of the towns where the game is played are dotted along the motorway the bisects the country from Liverpool in the west to Hull in the east.

My grandfather was a working class man from the north of England. A lifelong supporter of Liverpool Football Club, he once said that he would watch a game of rugby league, though he never did, but that he would never watch a game of rugby union. Class thing you see. Whereas rugby union was always played by people who could afford not to be paid, traditionally league was always played by people who didn’t mind a bob or two for something well done, football too.

Kiwis have made their mark playing the game in the UK. In 1982, the Maori trio of Ian Bell, Dean Bell and Clayton Friend made their way across the world to Carlisle in the north west of England to play for the local team, the Raiders. A journalist friend of mine now based in Asia, was covering the club for the local paper at that time, and recalled how it was often hard to keep a straight face when in the company of three young men who became known simply as “the Kiwis”.

After they had spent about three months in the city, he interviewed them in a pub in one of the less salubrious parts of town, and asked them what they thought of English rugby league and of Carlisle as a place. “The Kiwis were not very big men by rugby league standards and had been taking some heavy hits against the likes of Wigan and St Helens, so I expected them to say they were finding it tough,” he said.

He was astonished when they said they found the English game soft. They explained that in New Zealand the first scrum of every match produced a mass brawl, with the side winning the brawl usually winning the match. By contrast, they found the English game rather polite.

The trio also found the local pubs to be very genteel compared with those back home. For a start, women were allowed in pubs and beer was served in glasses instead of just drunk from crates piled on a table. They could not understand why there were so few fights in Carlisle’s pubs. They said they were used to fights breaking out all the time in Auckland’s pubs.

New Zealand introduced the game to Australia at the beginning of last century, but have since played the poorer relation in terms of quality, the Australians being largely unbeatable on the field, much like New Zealand is at rugby. Papua New Guinea is the only country in the world where the sport is the national game, and while they might provide a reasonable contest for most of the 80 minutes they are unlikely to win a match.

The Four Nations then will come down to a contest between England and New Zealand as to who will play the Aussies, making the competition quite predictable. As to who will nullify who we’ll have to wait and see.