Competing codes sustain strife in rugby

Six shillings a week spawned a new code of football in 1895. It was the amount demanded by 21 Yorkshire and Lancashire rugby clubs to compensate injured players. The idea that gentlemen should be paid for playing rugby horrified the upper-middle class that ran the game from London.

In the industrial north where winning was paramount, the clubs recruited stout-hearted lads from pit and mill and quietly slipped them a few bob to put food on the table when they were injured.

When London ordered them to desist, the 21 clubs met at the George Hotel in Huddersfield, resigned en masse, and rugby league was born. In 1908, Australia followed suit, which is why we are presently celebrating league's centenary.

Celebrating? Not a week passes without a major league identity bemoaning the fate of the "greatest game of all". "League is dying in the bush; crowds are down, Australian rules is taking over and, horror of horrors, league's finest are switching to union."

"No loyalty, no sense of history, no feeling for the game's traditions," they wail. Union officials, after a century of watching league snaffling union's finest, can't resist a wry smile.

Aware of their all too brief playing careers and the damage inflicted on their bodies, players are following the money trail to ensure their future. They realise how quickly their star status will disappear once they cease playing.

When union went professional in 1995, it was obvious that, with the game being played in more than 120 countries, a far wider television audience would guarantee it could buy the best talent. League, a major force only in eastern Australia and northern England, was in trouble.

Common sense and self-preservation should have been sufficient for both codes to end the century-old divorce. Suggestions of a remarriage unfortunately never got beyond the "wouldn't it be a hoot" stage. Union immediately started raiding league's talent base, and it hasn't stopped. Mark Gasnier and Sonny Bill Williams are merely the latest. It will get worse.

The obvious benefits of a merger were ignored. A century of fear and loathing between a class-conscious rugby establishment and working-class battlers was too deeply entrenched for reunification to be taken seriously.

League's response was equally bizarre. Despite its tiny support base, it resorted to macho breast-beating and sneering insults about union: the game and those who ran it. League, it boasted, would be bigger and better than ever. It was whistling in the dark and deep down league knew it.

Union then made some extraordinary decisions. The introduction of provincial football, now known as Super 14, was an outstanding success, providing rugby of international standard; but with only 15 matches a year from February to May, the season is over just as other codes are starting. And it can be viewed only on satellite TV by those who can shell out $1,000 a year, while league is on free to air.

Then followed internationals with third string northern hemisphere teams playing the All Blacks, Springboks and Wallabies. Tri-Nations was next, providing fabulous rugby, but three teams do not a competition make. It appears that is about to change. SANZAR has indicated that Super 14 will become Super 16 or more and will run from March to September. Extra teams from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa will, hopefully, be joined by teams from Argentina and the South Pacific.

A significant problem for union is the intransigence of the International Rugby Board and its refusal to trial the experimental law variations that have been tested in the southern hemisphere to near universal acclaim.

Australia's rugby union supremo John O'Neill, after pointing out that the ELVs (experimental law veriations) had ensured that the recent tests between the Springboks and the All Blacks were the best games in years, chided the northern hemisphere nations for their refusal to trial the new laws. He warned them of the possibility of a further split. Just what rugby needs: another split.

Former England hooker Brian Moore, displaying that patronising arrogance the Poms reserve for former colonies, disagreed. They were good games, he asserted, only because they were the best two teams in the world, but the claims about ELVs had not been subjected to "intellectual scrutiny". Australia, he claimed, supported the ELVs because of the competition from league.

That a hooker, and an English one at that, should intellectualise about rugby suggests Moore has played too many games without headgear. He failed to mention that South Africa and New Zealand, where there is no threat from league, also supported the ELVs. He concluded: "If you want to go your own way, then go; see how far you get without the economic power of England and France. Our game will be poorer without you but we will always have one."

O'Neill must have been tempted to respond: "And see how far you get without the five best rugby teams in the world. Imagine your World Cup final: Ireland v Romania? That should have the turnstiles clicking."

A hundred years on and the descendants of the blockheads who originally stuffed rugby are alive and well and on the verge of creating another split. Now more than ever rational heads are needed, not just to end this nonsense but to bring rugby devotees together again.

It won't be easy but if there is a spirit of compromise, it can happen. It's not merely a question of staving off threats from other codes. What should be foremost in the minds of those who love rugby is to gradually unite the codes under one umbrella.

The first step should be to create a world rugby body that would oversee both union and league to ensure that they worked towards ultimate amalgamation rather than endless conflict.

Soccer will always be the premier code but rugby should be a close second.