Thursday, May 06, 2004
NRL Expansion
Peter Jessup states a very good case for taking on all three teams in the Herald.
I thought I might flesh what he's saying out into some sort of timetable.
18 team comp
17 games for each team
9 at home and 8 away or vice versa.
Season kicks off the first weekend in March.
After 8 rounds are completed the teams can take four weekends off to assess where they are at and it would give the teams not travelling so well a chance to get back on track in terms of planning for the season, recruiting for key positions and healing injured players. There could be some sort of transfer window where players who had been signed on short-term contracts up until thismid season break are able to move, or players who wish to be released can move with permission from their club.
The City v Country game could be played in NSW on the Friday of the first weekend and perhaps a new match between Queensland trial teams is played on the Saturday, from which their State of Origin team will be picked. The City v Country games have been getting stale over the years mainly because the players have to play so many games and back up in the next day or two so they are hardly going to destroy themselves.
Theoretically these games should be only slightly below the Origin matches in terms of skill and intensity and certainly better than your average club game. I've no doubt that they could attract a good number of spectators and tv viewers if people know that the players are going to be giving it their all.
Queensland could easily get two good trial teams on the pitch. And it would be cool to see some good senior club footballers from the strong Brisbane and Queensland comps playing against the big boys from the NRL if any were deemed good enough.
Perhaps even in the same weekend you could have a smaller touring international side play an NRL selection to round out the weekend. Say France or Papua New Guinea against an under 22/23 NRL team. Even a Bartercard cup team from NZ could play. Or a Pacific Island team made up of Polynesian players from within and outside the NRL, New Zealand Maori v Australian Aborigines or New Zealand Domestic Team v Non NRL Australian team. There are several possibilities for good matches and they could be a great vehicle for promoting the game. Why not have matches like those as curtain raisers to the big trial matches on Saturday night and Sunday afternoons for that matter. They could be picked up by the tv stations as well.
So after the City v Country and other trial game are played we move into three weekends where the State of Origin gets big saturday billing. It would eat whatever rugby has to offer alive. In fact it would probably coincide nicely with the run up to the Super 12 semifinals and definately hurt Australian rugby. Great stuff!
And in New Zealand we could have our own Origin Series going alongside the Australian State of Origin series between Northern Zone and Southern Zone teams (Wellington playing in the Southern team). All our players would be available as none of them are eligible for the State of Origin series.
Then it's back into the NRL. Nine consecutive weekends of NRL football, building up nicely to the playoffs. The playoffs take place. Best of 8 same as it is currently. Or possibly expanded to top ten with the top two sides sitting out the first weekend.
That adds up to 26 weekends of footie (17 regular season, 5 playoff weekends, and four weekends for rep games).
Then post season either Australia or New Zealand sends a touring team to the Northern Hemisphere or they send a team down under.
That sounds like an interesting season to me. Better than watching the same shitty teams (no offence South Sydney, Manly, North Queensland, Wests Tigers but you lose regularly year after year) playing each other over 26 weekends in a row as it is now with other more important games jammed midweek or friday nights is really not the way to go. Good god, can you imagine how crap it would be if the NPC went for 26 weeks before the semi finalists were found. I don't know about you but I'd be suicidal.
I think a good comparison to make is with the NFL in the United States. It goes for 17 weeks with each team playing 16 matches (each team gets a bye). Then the playoffs start. The games are hard and uncompromising every week because the season is over with so quickly. The reason why it's over so quickly is because it's a damn hard sport. If they could play 30 weekends a year then they would but the players can't sustain the required level of intensity over that period. Meanwhile the NRL constantly goes on about how it's the toughest club competition in the world. Well maybe it might come close to the NFL if it was actually played over a shorter time period with more on the line each week and more opportunity for players to rest up during the season or post season. The Warriors should almost be dead and buried with the start they have had, but if they win their next two or three games (against weaker teams I might add) they are just about back in the top 8.
18 teams can be handled by the NRL. There are a lot more NZ players in the NRL than there used to be and if anything the number can and will increase. From memory there were about a dozen in the early 1990s and now there are about 23 on the Warriors roster alone and another 26 on the rosters of other teams according to the NRL website. [I should add that there are roughly another dozen NZ born players who have either declared they wish to play for Australia or who moved to Australia at a young age and have come through the Australian system.] That's 49 eligible players for NZ from the NRL alone and more than enough to have a competitive NZ origin series. Who knows maybe it would even entice a couple of young players to decide to play for NZ instead of Australia in the future.
Back to my original train of thought ... having more teams will help distribute the talent a little bit and encourage more young footballers in New Zealand (Wellington in particular) and the Central Coast (NSW) and Gold Coast (Queensland) to take the game seriously. There is talk of Sydney not being able to support the same number of teams that it has now (nine of the fifteen) but if that's the case then go to 18 and let the natural selection process sort them out. I'm sure that if the competition grows to take in three new teams from outside Sydney now then you may well see teams from Adelaide, Perth and possibly even a second Brisbane team come into the frame once more to replace any Sydney drop outs and mergers.
But we all know it will be Aussie doing what they want, to serve their own interests for the next 50 years and in 2054 Australia will beat New Zealand by 20 points in the Anzac Test and whitewash the Poms on a three match tour. Boring... like the New Zealand rugby calendar. But that's for another time and another blog.
I thought I might flesh what he's saying out into some sort of timetable.
18 team comp
17 games for each team
9 at home and 8 away or vice versa.
Season kicks off the first weekend in March.
After 8 rounds are completed the teams can take four weekends off to assess where they are at and it would give the teams not travelling so well a chance to get back on track in terms of planning for the season, recruiting for key positions and healing injured players. There could be some sort of transfer window where players who had been signed on short-term contracts up until thismid season break are able to move, or players who wish to be released can move with permission from their club.
The City v Country game could be played in NSW on the Friday of the first weekend and perhaps a new match between Queensland trial teams is played on the Saturday, from which their State of Origin team will be picked. The City v Country games have been getting stale over the years mainly because the players have to play so many games and back up in the next day or two so they are hardly going to destroy themselves.
Theoretically these games should be only slightly below the Origin matches in terms of skill and intensity and certainly better than your average club game. I've no doubt that they could attract a good number of spectators and tv viewers if people know that the players are going to be giving it their all.
Queensland could easily get two good trial teams on the pitch. And it would be cool to see some good senior club footballers from the strong Brisbane and Queensland comps playing against the big boys from the NRL if any were deemed good enough.
Perhaps even in the same weekend you could have a smaller touring international side play an NRL selection to round out the weekend. Say France or Papua New Guinea against an under 22/23 NRL team. Even a Bartercard cup team from NZ could play. Or a Pacific Island team made up of Polynesian players from within and outside the NRL, New Zealand Maori v Australian Aborigines or New Zealand Domestic Team v Non NRL Australian team. There are several possibilities for good matches and they could be a great vehicle for promoting the game. Why not have matches like those as curtain raisers to the big trial matches on Saturday night and Sunday afternoons for that matter. They could be picked up by the tv stations as well.
So after the City v Country and other trial game are played we move into three weekends where the State of Origin gets big saturday billing. It would eat whatever rugby has to offer alive. In fact it would probably coincide nicely with the run up to the Super 12 semifinals and definately hurt Australian rugby. Great stuff!
And in New Zealand we could have our own Origin Series going alongside the Australian State of Origin series between Northern Zone and Southern Zone teams (Wellington playing in the Southern team). All our players would be available as none of them are eligible for the State of Origin series.
Then it's back into the NRL. Nine consecutive weekends of NRL football, building up nicely to the playoffs. The playoffs take place. Best of 8 same as it is currently. Or possibly expanded to top ten with the top two sides sitting out the first weekend.
That adds up to 26 weekends of footie (17 regular season, 5 playoff weekends, and four weekends for rep games).
Then post season either Australia or New Zealand sends a touring team to the Northern Hemisphere or they send a team down under.
That sounds like an interesting season to me. Better than watching the same shitty teams (no offence South Sydney, Manly, North Queensland, Wests Tigers but you lose regularly year after year) playing each other over 26 weekends in a row as it is now with other more important games jammed midweek or friday nights is really not the way to go. Good god, can you imagine how crap it would be if the NPC went for 26 weeks before the semi finalists were found. I don't know about you but I'd be suicidal.
I think a good comparison to make is with the NFL in the United States. It goes for 17 weeks with each team playing 16 matches (each team gets a bye). Then the playoffs start. The games are hard and uncompromising every week because the season is over with so quickly. The reason why it's over so quickly is because it's a damn hard sport. If they could play 30 weekends a year then they would but the players can't sustain the required level of intensity over that period. Meanwhile the NRL constantly goes on about how it's the toughest club competition in the world. Well maybe it might come close to the NFL if it was actually played over a shorter time period with more on the line each week and more opportunity for players to rest up during the season or post season. The Warriors should almost be dead and buried with the start they have had, but if they win their next two or three games (against weaker teams I might add) they are just about back in the top 8.
18 teams can be handled by the NRL. There are a lot more NZ players in the NRL than there used to be and if anything the number can and will increase. From memory there were about a dozen in the early 1990s and now there are about 23 on the Warriors roster alone and another 26 on the rosters of other teams according to the NRL website. [I should add that there are roughly another dozen NZ born players who have either declared they wish to play for Australia or who moved to Australia at a young age and have come through the Australian system.] That's 49 eligible players for NZ from the NRL alone and more than enough to have a competitive NZ origin series. Who knows maybe it would even entice a couple of young players to decide to play for NZ instead of Australia in the future.
Back to my original train of thought ... having more teams will help distribute the talent a little bit and encourage more young footballers in New Zealand (Wellington in particular) and the Central Coast (NSW) and Gold Coast (Queensland) to take the game seriously. There is talk of Sydney not being able to support the same number of teams that it has now (nine of the fifteen) but if that's the case then go to 18 and let the natural selection process sort them out. I'm sure that if the competition grows to take in three new teams from outside Sydney now then you may well see teams from Adelaide, Perth and possibly even a second Brisbane team come into the frame once more to replace any Sydney drop outs and mergers.
But we all know it will be Aussie doing what they want, to serve their own interests for the next 50 years and in 2054 Australia will beat New Zealand by 20 points in the Anzac Test and whitewash the Poms on a three match tour. Boring... like the New Zealand rugby calendar. But that's for another time and another blog.
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