International rugby league. The most divisive three-word phrase in the greatest game of all this side of ‘Phil Gould monologue’; a concept that inevitably stirs internet trolls out of their winter slumber.

It also appears pivotal to rugby league’s evolution and survival. So why do so many people in positions of influence skewer it?

Speaking on Triple M last week, Ray Warren – the ‘voice’ of rugby league – implied the NRL’s representative stars ought to go on strike rather than front up for the Four Nations tournament due to the demand on their bodies and minds.

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Mal Meninga took the decision out of the players’ hands, suggesting the amount of injuries to Australian players warranted the tournament being called off altogether.

Meanwhile, fellow Roarer Daniel Murphy opined that after a successful World Cup in 2013, international rugby league should effectively take a 24-month rest rather than bother with another meaningless tournament.

These gentlemen are as entitled to their opinions as I am to mine. Variations of them have been rinsed, repeated and re-enforced as fact since around the time rugby league dragged itself off the post-Super League canvas.

And judging by the public response to the aforementioned opinions, a lot of rugby league fans are sick and tired of having them rammed down their throats. Count me among them.

You could probably say that the people who’ve attended the past four encounters between international rugby league’s ‘big three’ – that’s crowds of 67,575, 74,468, 25,429 and 47,813 for those keeping score at home – are equally enamoured of the international game.

And you can probably mark the relative paucity of that 25,429 attendance for May’s trans-Tasman Test in Sydney down to the relentless negativity of media organisations using the autumn of their influence to attack the game that gives them so many devoted eyeballs in the first place.



Sentiment is starting to swing, though, as younger league lovers begin to find some voice.

Writing for Guardian Australia last week, Nick Tedeschi unleashed a torrent of valid points about international rugby league being an organisational shambles that was perhaps unfairly misinterpreted as more mere vitriol.

Perhaps, like myself, he’ll see Steve Mascord’s Monday revelation that the Rugby League International Federation is on the brink of unveiling a 12-year plan (!) as another false dawn. Or Saturday’s loss by Australia’s A-team to New Zealand’s B-team as the harbinger of the apocalypse.

In fact, if you delve into the machinations of the battle for control between rival factions in the USA, you’ll wonder how rugby league will ever become a truly international game at all.

You see, we lovers of international rugby league don’t have our blinkers on. The race for relevance will be a marathon, not a sprint.

The ‘big three’ are clearly several Jarryd Hayne kick returns ahead of the trailing pack, who occasionally flatter to deceive (Exhibit A: Samoa’s gutsy 32-26 loss to England on Saturday) with regards to getting closer.

Eligibility rules best described as ‘fluid’ don’t do the legitimacy of the international game any favours. State bodies dangling the carrot of State of Origin under the noses of any young star who so much as pitches a tent within their borders are also counter-productive. So too pundits who routinely bag Manly fans for not crossing the Spit Bridge, but can barely see beyond it themselves.

Nope, international rugby league is far from perfect. But it exists in the present, and to stop the game’s stars departing for that so-called ‘bigger stage’, it’s essential for the future.



It’s also got a storied past. Like this, for example, which had somehow been erased from my memory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2M4k6ZTh82U

Three years before the Super League war fully erupted and six years before the Melbourne Storm, 31,000 extremely noisy people crammed into an Australian Rules stadium to watch Australia get thumped by the Lions.

Yet Australian administrators have turned down the option of a Great Britain tour in 2015 on the grounds of player welfare.

If the Four Nations builds on its opening weekend goodwill, though, they’ll be nigh on impossible to turn down again.

And if the RLIF’s 12-year plan hasn’t pencilled in a returned Sam Burgess and Sonny Bill Williams squaring off for the Poms and Kiwis respectively in a rematch of the 2013 World Cup semi-final epic – officially declared the best event to happen at Wembley last year, bar none – sometime in late 2016, it better be because the Wembley stage isn’t deemed big enough.