Start of something big? The Toronto Wolfpack after their first game, against Hull earlier this year. Credit:Toronto Wolfpack The implication of this may not be immediately apparent; another full-time professional rugby league competition is coming onto the NRL's turf, in a city and at a venue that wants more games, and taking money that could be going into League Central coffers. It's the best news Discord has heard this year. All this time we thought the NRL would go to London first – the fact it is happening in reverse only underscores just how much ambition is lacking in the Australian halls of power right now. While the NRL plays petty politics over the make-up of the commission and argues with clubs and players over money, the British game is setting up clubs in North America, has a second French franchise heading for Super League and is now playing matches in Australia. The amount of money at the disposal of bid teams in Perth, Wellington, Central Queensland, Port Moresby and maybe even the Central Coast and Darwin is potentially comparable to what it has taken to set up the Toronto Wolfpack, who we understand will soon be joined in the British lower divisions by a side in New York City.

Backers for a Dublin franchise are also being sought; Super League's lower salary cap makes expansion easier while travel can be covered by contra. Direct, non-stop flights from Australia's west coast are about to start to London. What is to stop all the frustrated officials in Australia, New Zealand, PNG and Fiji who have been repeatedly turned away by the NRL from doing what mining magnate David Argyle has done in Toronto and setting up a foreign franchise that can slowly work its way up the British divisions? The game in Britain is boxed in commercially, with Sky money limited and the BBC not even interested enough to pay more than a pittance for the England-Samoa international earlier this year. It struggles for national publicity and wages are well below NRL levels, leaving players vulnerable to raids from rugby union. Red Hall, then, has the motivation and now the blueprint to enter the Australasian market aggressively, sweeping up sponsors who can't afford to back the NRL or undercutting those who already do. To quote David Gallop, it needs to fish where the fish are and there are plenty of very hungry rugby league fish in Australia.

A commercial office – why not move into the World Cup's inexpensive headquarters in Haymarket when it moves out – would find broadcast partners, government support and sponsors abundant if there was a degree of persistence. Imagine a southern hemisphere group of clubs playing home and away games in month long blocks like Toronto – Perth, Central Coast, Central Queensland, Wellington, Port Moresby, Fiji, Ipswich all backed by local governments and slowly working their way up the divisions! North Sydney Bears, do you have Nigel Wood's number? Rugby league could go from being the most parochial and regional of sports to a league structure with the widest footprint of any game in the world over the course of the next decade – all because the British game is small enough to move and change quickly and desperate enough to try. The new teams, then, would have away games not just in the north of England but in Canada, New York and the south of France. They would also be able to play against each other here, creating fresh fully professional rugby league events in Australia that would be completely outside the jurisdiction of the NRL and its affiliates. Media, governments and sponsors in regions currently snubbed by the NRL would eat this content up and the British game could leverage competitive tensions that already exist in southern hemisphere markets; the content appearing on opposing networks to those covering the NRL and sponsored by the opposition of NRL sponsors. Toronto have shown what's possible. Hell, if the British game went back to winter it could have the summer months Down Under to itself, dominating the media.

Meanwhile, the same old suspects in the west of Sydney have the same old arguments over the same old things as crowds and ratings dwindle. You snooze, you lose. --------------------------------------------- I want to share with you a great story from the Steelers reunion at WIN Stadium on Sunday, which I was lucky enough to attend as part of my Wollongong launch for my new book Touchstones. Jeff Masters – Cocco to his friends – played 25 minutes of the Steelers' first trial at Dapto Showground in 1982 on the wing. Not first grade. Third grade. He was replaced and told not to come back.