I'm sure you could add a dozen things to the list, particularly if you throw in the failings of the NRL and Super League. But, speaking as someone who saw Robbie Farah's only previous appearance for Lebanon – also at halfback – 15 years ago in Tripoli, it's probably incumbent upon me to point out what we do have and how far we've come. Only three world cups ago, we didn't even have enough countries playing the game to have a qualifying process. If you had a few rugby league teams, you were in. Not so long ago, the only full-time employee of the Rugby League International Federation was Tas Baitieri and he he was based at the Narrabeen Institute of Sport and, technically, probably didn't qualify as a full-time employee of the RLIF at all. Now the RLIF have a well-appointed office in Fitzrovia, London, and a chief executive. Sure, the office is below street level and the CEO is leaving – but it's a start.

The idea of having cities and states bid for matches with public funds, well established in other sports, is also relatively new to rugby league. This World Cup will make $7 million to $10 million. The process, which will see only two games played in Sydney in the World Cup, has been successfully translated to the northern hemisphere and the 2021 tournament is being financed out of British government "Northern Powerhouse" funding. We have a team in Toronto that crosses the Atlantic for away games. We're about to have one in New York. The Queensland Cup was won by a team from Papua New Guinea. The 2025 World Cup is in the United States and Canada! Those of us who love music have seen the carriage of choice move from acetate to CD to MP3 to the cloud in a third of a lifetime. Yet previously two or three lifetimes could have passed while this didn't change at all.