New frontier: Paul Broughton with three Chinese rugby league players. Meanwhile, an 85-year-old former rugby league player, coach, administrator and club patron, sits forlornly in his Gold Coast unit, waiting for a phone call from the NRL to discuss his bid to have the fourth football code in Australia invest in China. Paul Broughton, the former coach of Balmain and Newtown, the NSWRL's special projects executive under John Quayle and the man after whom the medal for the Gold Coast Titan's best and fairest player is named, has been waiting well over a year for a conversation with Rugby League Central. He's spent $250,000, the last of his retirement dollars, negotiating with Shanghai universities and sports authorities to develop rugby league in a city of 27 million people, together with an exchange system where Chinese athletes could play in the NRL. He says: "Unless grants come from somewhere, there will be no Chinese team, men's or women's, in the 2017 Rugby League World Cup for Universities in Australia. "A university team is the only deck card we have over AFL and even rugby and soccer. And for a whole 12 months no one [at the NRL] has listened."

The under-siege NSW Sports Minister, Stuart Ayres, had time to write to him on April 8, saying: "I congratulate you on your initiative and tremendous effort to introduce rugby league to China and on establishing 10-year agreements with government, universities and the school system." Ayres then directed Broughton to the Australian Government's 2015 Asia Sport Development Partnership, which supports innovations in Asia. However, Ayres correctly pointed to Broughton's catch 22: "In order to apply for funding, a partnership would need to be entered into with the NRL who would be required to apply for the funding as the recognised National Sporting Organisation." Admittedly, the under-staffed NRL can't fund and progress its own "pathways program" in NSW and Queensland, relegating Broughton's China project to the "too hard" basket. However, three NRL clubs have seized on the data Broughton has acquired on the physical attributes of Chinese athletes.

"I'm indebted to Manly, Penrith and Broncos," Broughton said. "Their intellectual property allowed me to create a standard of testing that was translated into Mandarin by Griffith University. The only way I was ever going to be sure that the Chinese athletes could play was to create a test that encompassed all the necessary ingredients of the profile of a rugby league player. The aggression, of course, comes from the martial arts background and the heart from the heritage. "The Australian Chinese and the migrant population is around 850,000 and as they have no 'heroes on the field of play', they do not watch, view, read about, follow, play, join in, nor support the game of rugby league." So, if the NRL won't reply, why not turn to Clive Palmer, a former neighbour on Broughton's Gold Coast, with buckets of money and ties with China? After all, Clive was a front-row forward in his primary school team and then transformed himself into a skinny winger in the Southport Tigers under-14s 1969 premiership team. In the early 1970s, he established a new club, the Surfers' Paradise Pirates, equipped it with jumpers and bought a field on the then under-developed Isle of Capri. However, Clive quickly lost interest, disappeared and the club folded. Maybe that's the game plan the NRL has for Broughton, the game's oldest active servant. He won't disappear, having already approached Clive, persistently, for three years.

"I've always received a polite, 'No'," Broughton said. "That's more than I've got from the NRL."