Funky Friday Footy: Australian National Rugby League Finals Series

Today, the Big Dood is back with a preview of this weekend's Australian National Rugby League Finals Series against an interesting backdrop of the history of the sport. Take it away, Big Dood:

This weekend marks the preliminary final contests for Australia’s National Rugby League Championship. (In the US we would call these games semi-finals, but for some reason, Australian sports have semi-finals, followed by preliminary finals, and finally… the final. Which is not entirely nonsense given the relative pliability of the adjective “semi.”)

Of course I recently missed with the All Blacks falling short by one point on the cover over the Wallabies. But that friends, was Rugby Union. This is Rugby League – a very different game.

If you’re like me and have not long understood the difference between League and Union rules, it’s worth taking a quick look back in time. This is, after all, the centennial season of Australia’s NRL. So let’s go back, shall we? To mother England…

For a deep dive, you can check out an old article from god knows where called The “Rugby” Game by Sean Fagan. If you like Rugby, which you must at least a little bit to have gotten this far, this article is a pretty good read, but if you’re pressed for time, I’ll sum up.

The short version is that the first Rugby Union in England firmly intended to play an “amateur” game - that is to say, no one could be paid to play. They did this to keep out the riff raff. The gentry of southern England and London could afford to devote a lot of spare time to their clubs, but this was more difficult for miners and factory workers in the north. Any time spent playing rugby was time not spent working and earning money. The Union was strident in its resistance to playing alongside the soot-covered hordes of northerners from the likes of Leeds and Halifax, so they fought tooth and nail to keep club owners from offering compensation to players. It seems completely counterintuitive to me that Rugby, of all sports, began as a sport for the upper crust. Golf, polo, croquet . . . seemingly understandable. But why not leave the masses to tackle each other in the mud whilst you sip sloe gin fizz and tally-ho after the foxes?

But the rich wanted their game, clean and pure, and so there was hemming, hawing, rule- breaking, and punishment for those who hired muscle from the north to play for their teams. Eventually, a split occurred that changed the game dramatically. A new rugby league, played primarily by clubs in northern, working-class towns, wholly embraced payment to players and also instituted a number of rule changes. For example, the new rules de-emphasized the scrum, a cornerstone of the Union game. League rules also did away with line out throws and reduced the sides to 13 players apiece. The intention was to make the game, lighter, quicker and less injurious, as working class players would stand to lose a good deal more from a broken leg than would a banker or a barrister down south. There was also another underlying incentive to increase the pace of the sport - to attract more paying customers to games (paid attendance was, of course, what made player compensation possible in the first place).

So then, roughly 110 years after these disputes were hashed out in rainy English shires, I found myself taking the football temperature of the land down under. Australia surely enjoys their international competitions played under Union rules, but, in my impression, it is before the National Rugby League where the die-hards come to kneel -- the blue collar, dyed in the wool version of the sport.

Luckily for me, on my first day in Sydney, having already secured two weekends of Televised NRL beneath my belt, I headed to Sydney Football Stadium to see the Roosters do battle with a storied rival, the Parramatta Eeels. I noticed that while the crowd was small (perhaps 15,000 in a stadium built for 4 times that capacity) everyone in attendance was deeply vested in the outcome of the contest. Well almost everyone. The cheers were raucous and there was a strong presence from visiting supporters. A nice sense of rivalry without any real hostility between fans with opposing rooting interests. And… the game was quick. My lovely goylefriend and I were in and out in roughly 90 minutes. Non-stop action with no lazy breaks for TV commercials.

I don’t think I’ve had a better day since.

Now to the Action.

Cronulla Sharks +6 vs. Melbourne Storm

Much of the debate leading up to this one has been a league wide analysis of which sides play fair, which sides play dirty. Melbourne is being chastised for their use of “grapple tackles” and for spawning the use of grappling by other teams.

I guess grabbing people around the head and neck while in the ruck is technically within the rules, though generally frowned upon. I don’t completely understand the beef, so I am going to continue to make my Aussie sporting plays based on what little footholds I can find for my conscience. For that reason I’m going against Cronulla here. Even though I spent a lovely afternoon in Cronulla during my trip, I think the area’s best shot at any American’s recollection is probably the fact that in 2005, a series of racially motivated violent events and widespread unrest kept the suburb itself in a bit of a grapple-hold. Angry throngs yelled things like “no more Lebs (Lebanese immigrants)” and “We grew here, you flew here” and other such nonsense.

It’s no doubt a complicated story that I don’t fully understand, but race riots in the year 2005? That’s just un-Australian. Surely the place hasn’t yet lived this down so as to have such a big win coming its way.

The pick: Melbourne Storm -6 over Cronulla Sharks.

(Ed.’s note: Sadly, this game has already been played. We couldn’t get the post up in time. And the Big Dood was right. Melbourne crushed Cronulla, 28-0. The Big Dood also sent us an “analysis of the other preliminary final match, between the Manly Sea Eagles (-8) and New Zealand Warriors. He likes the Sea Eagles, but his pick was entirely based on a moment of “profound beauty” that he enjoyed at the Sydney Harbor on the way back “from an afternoon of quiet on Manly’s shimmering shore.” That must have been terrific for him, but there is no way we are picking based on that. We never said that Big Dood wasn’t crazy. And he’ll be back later with a preview of the Aussie Rules Football “Grand Final.” It will be grand. And of course we’ll be back tomorrow with NCAA American football picks.)