On Saturday evening we will know whether Catalans Dragons or Leigh Centurions will be playing in the Championship next season. The losers of the Million Pound Game (that name – eurgh!) will go down and the odds are on a spineless Dragons team failing to play to their potential at a hostile Leigh Sports Village. That will be a great shame for Catalans and French rugby as a whole, but there are positives amid the gloom. It would mean two derbies with Toulouse Olympique and both clubs would be expected to challenge Toronto Wolfpack and London Broncos for promotion.

And that, in a nutshell, is the other problem. Part-time clubs in the Championship will have to travel to all four of those exciting destinations, flung far from the M62. Throw in either Barrow or Whitehaven – who meet in the League 1 play-off final on Sunday – and the financial impact on clubs such as Swinton, Batley, Sheffield, Featherstone is considerable. But they better get used to it, as there could soon be away trips to the USA and Ireland on the schedule, too.

The rumours about a New York franchise joining League One in 2020 are gathering pace but it seems the picture may be more complex. While Eric Perez, the effervescent face of Toronto Wolfpack, is behind one project – perhaps surprisingly given his current role as Wolfpack CEO – that appears to be focussed on Hamilton, a Canadian city about the size of Leeds on the banks of Lake Ontario and home of the CFL’s Tiger Cats. A group of UK-based investors are working on a project for New York/New Jersey that has already lined up high-profile players and coach. And a third party – with members based in Australia and the US – are looking to raise the $5m they believe necessary to put a full-time team into Boston or Chicago with sufficient talent to all-but guarantee promotion. A fourth interested party have had talks with Philadephia’s stadium. What is for sure, away games are getting more interesting.

As part of their World Cup bid, Moore Sports International (MSI) promised to launch a professional rugby league competition in the US. If there are two or three professional clubs already competing in the British league, that seems unfeasible. Perhaps MSI will support the other franchises instead.

Launching a rugby league competition in the US seems overly ambitious at present. Despite PRO Rugby lasting just one season, there are two new professional rugby union competitions launching next year. A strange beast from the off, PRO Rugby had six teams composed of a couple of veteran professionals, some of the best American semi-pros (the USA’s elite professionals are spread all over Europe) and college players. There were two players of note to league fans: NRL veteran and former Kangaroo Timana Tahu at Denver Stampede, and Italian stalwart Mirco Bergamasco, who followed his spell with Sacramento Express by turning to league with Saluzzo-North West Roosters and the national team.

Now comes Super Rugby, a series of men’s and women’s sevens tournaments promoted by former St George half-back David Niu, for years the driving force behind the American National Rugby League (AMNRL) and those perennial US champions in the early 2000s, Glen Mills Bulls. And USA captain Mark Offerdahl is considering an offer to play union for New Orleans Gold in Major League Rugby, a new 15-a-side pro league, before returning to league in New York next summer. He awaits developments for professional rugby league there with bated breath.

Premiership rugby union took a second match to the US last week, when only 6,271 turned out to see a horror show of a game between Saracens and Newcastle at Philadelphia. The pre-match excuses sounded like the letters page from League Express: the match was on when the locals were playing their opening games of the club season; the schools had only just gone back; the NFL has just kicked off; Saturday is college football day. But at least Premiership Rugby knows it is taking baby steps. They put on several coaching clinics and made community visits. Promoted by AEG Rugby, the Premiership games should grow year on year if given the chance. Concurrently, there is increasing talk of a pro union club launching in the States to play in the now inter-continental Pro 14.

Rugby league is looking to do things rather differently. But with 16,000 gridiron players coming out of college every year with nowhere else to play – not to mention a million high school football players – it can only be a matter of time before someone gets a professional rugby circuit up and running in the US.

Foreign quota

With only a dozen professional clubs still in action, the 14 World Cup nations are finalising their squads and crossing their fingers that their players come through unscathed this weekend, after which only the Super League Grand Finalists will remain.

The USA were first off the rank, head Coach Brian McDermott naming 11 domestic-based players and two from Toronto Wolfpack on his RLWC roster. There are nine survivors from their last remarkable World Cup campaign, and only former Wigan prop Eddy Pettybourne has not played for the USA since, Hull-bound Bureta Faraimo making his return in last week’s 36-18 win over Canada in Toronto.

It was especially heartening to see Andrew Kneisly of Philadelphia Fight, New York Knights’ Joshua Rice (highly rated by Offerdahl), and White Plains Wombats duo CJ Cortalano and Matt Walsh make the cut. All three have been playing for the USA for five or six years now but were left out of the 2013 squad in favour of Australian-based heritage players. Their time has come.

Clubcall: Widnes Vikings

Having come away from Perpignan with their top-flight status intact, Widnes then faced a social media lambasting for their contribution to Super League. It was most unfair. The Vikings, who were dogged and resilient in the Dragons’ den – are a far more positive member of the competition than London or Bradford were when relegated in 2014 despite their big city status, and are not far off having the presence Hull KR had when they went down last year.

Attendances at Widnes have been reliably between 4,000 and 6,000 throughout their seven seasons back in the top flight; their Academy has again been graded outstanding by the RFL auditors, they provide top flight opportunities to products of neighbouring academies; and appear to live within their means. That has meant fielding a mediocre side at times but flirting this close with relegation may change their recruit and retain policy for next year.

Goal-line drop-out

No Helmets made its annual appearance at an NFL game at Wembley last Sunday, supporting the friends-of-league Jacksonville Jaguars as they romped to victory over Baltimore. It struck me how the crowd was uncannily similar in several respects to the Challenge Cup final fans of yore.

There was a very clear and extremely impressive show of support for the sport itself, a declaration that: “I am a fan of this game and am embracing this opportunity to prove it.” Around us in the cheap seats or on the packed tube, and in bars around Euston and St Pancras, you would have struggled to guess which two teams were actually playing.

There were fans in jerseys of every NFL team and many more from around the world. Some had travelled huge distances to be there – there were German, Irish and Dutch voices around us. There were thousands of Ravens fans too, most of whom had seeped away down Wembley Way well before they scored a late consolation. Trailing 44-0 does that to you. I was not the only spectator defiantly sporting a rugby league shirt: a chap in a Leeds Rhinos shirt was spotted queueing for the two-foot, nine-quid hot dog!

Fifth and last

The RFL are hopefully pay close attention to the NFL’s advances on London. Taking one-off games on the road is extremely expensive and time-consuming but those costs can be sliced up if part of a bigger programme. Plans for Magic 2018 are yet to be announced, but the RFL were looking at playing double-headers in three cities over a long weekend, rather than six games in two days in one stadium.

That sounds attractive but I would like to see that evolve into a return of On The Road games as part of an overall gospel-spreading strategy. Necessity is often the mother of invention. Over the next year or two, almost every club in Super League is going to request a period without a home game while the grass is left to grow or their home is a building site. It is an ideal opportunity to make every club take one home game a season to a venue that is part of an overall development strategy linked with league expansion and/or the 2021 Rugby League World Cup.

Take Leeds to St James’s Park; have St Helens and Widnes play a double-header at Anfield; Hull and Castleford could play in the East Midlands, a genuine development area for them both. Wigan should be playing a major home game in London every year; while Warrington could make Bristol or Cardiff their satellite centre.

When this happened in the late 1990s with Gateshead, Leicester and Northampton it was ad-hoc, not part of a strategic or promoted programme. Take the same home team back there every season for five years, as South Sydney do in Cairns and Jacksonville Jaguars do at Wembley. It is amazing what roots can grow when regularly watered.

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