Welcome to The Maroon Observer, a weekly newsletter about rugby league, Queensland rugby league in Queensland. It’s another reading of the news.
As the off-season nears its end and the return of football is just over the horizon, the next few newsletters will take a look back at the news of the last five months, distill it down to a few sweaty PVL jokes and point to what I think will be some of the recurring themes of this year in rugby league.
Expansion I
The confirmation that PNG will enter the NRLM in 2028 was received with a dull thud.
It’s not hard to work out why. There were so many leaks, so many alleged ‘done deals’ by talk back radio and columnists racing to be the one to break the news for the fifth time, that when it was finally announced, everyone just shrugged their shoulders. We already knew the details, and had our collective concerns ignored, so the announcement was nothing.
Adding a new team to the league should be the kind of thing that fires up fans. It’s a sign that the game is in robust health when outside people are prepared to pour money and effort into setting up a new team. Putting aside my misgivings about operations and optics, having a third nation represented in the competition should be a sign of strength of the game’s cultural footprint.
It had all the appeal of any government funding announcement, including a lot of content that was supposedly to make you feel like something good is happening but is also inescapably boring. Absent was much detail that the rugby league nerds would like to get their teeth into - names, colours, jerseys, players - which would not have helped and so this was as dry, and received about as well, as a third stringer contract signing. That it was done in the shadow of Christmas, when almost everyone had switched their brains off, absolutely did not help.
Chalk up another mishandling of an important announcement to the administration.
Anyway, last year, I wrote about how everyone who goes to PNG seems to come back with some anecdote involving locals engaged in violence. Without having gone myself, I harboured some doubts that things were quite as bad as that. Having kept an eye on the Post Courier’s headlines since the PNG team seemed relatively plausible, I think it’s time to admit I was wrong.
A few weeks ago, a video with some specific content went viral on social media in Papua New Guinea:
Viral images showing a group of bow-and-arrow wielding men dangling mutilated body parts that appears to depict “horrific acts of cannibalism” have sparked outrage in Papua New Guinea.
The front page of the country’s largest newspaper, the Papua New Guinea Post, depicted gruesome scenes from a video of the gang holding what appears to be a severed foot.
This prompted the head of the local law society to speak out:
The incident’s description as a “barbaric killing, mutilation and cannibalism” by the president of the Papua New Guinea law society Hubert Namani has sparked outrage from Goilala’s parliamentary representative Casmiro Aia.
He’s what Mr Aia had to say:
“The office of the President of the PNG Law Society is a noble consitutitional office, and for cannibalism to come out of his mouth, to suggest that Papua New Guineans in the likes of Goilala eat humans leaves a lot to be decided,” Mr Aia said.
Bravo, sir. Stand up for your constituents and all that. Oh, you have more to add?
Mr Aia clarifying the actions seen in the video said, "I may not be a lawyer, but I do have a background in law enforcement and that simply tells me that there was no act of eating, though, the youths were holding pieces of chopped body."
He further added, "It is no different to mass killings and loading of bodies on dyna trucks, pouring hot water and pushing hot iron into women's genitals and burning women alive on suspicion of witchcraft, tying of live human and pulling them on the dusty or rough roads, chopping people beyond recognition."
Ah, so when we say we’re concerned about the reputation of parts of PNG, the horrific violence and mutilation isn’t the concern, it’s the specific imputation of cannibalism (that the Police Minister also referenced) that matters? I see. I think we may have slightly different views of the world.
In other recent Papua New Guinean news, it was the first anniversary of Black Wednesday, water rationing that has been in place for a decade in Port Moresby will be alleviated in five to seven years’ time, a major city is not currently included in an electorate after poorly thought out reforms, there was a “mass arrest” following an attack at a school in Port Moresby and PNG Hunters’ Brandon Nima came out in support of alleged rapist, Keven Appo. Meanwhile on NRL dot com, we were treated to Roy Masters’ airbrushed memories of 40 years ago. In conclusion, Papua New Guinea is a land of contrasts.
I am still intrigued by the prospect of a PNG team in the NRL on its own merits, such as they are, and what kind of change that may signal over the coming decade, but I am positively foaming at the mouth to see how the sleepy Sydney suburban sport responds to this soon-to-be weekly contact with a very different culture.
Programming notes
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I’ve been turning over whether to have paid subscriptions to The Maroon Observer since inception in 2023. I stuck to ‘no’ for various reasons, none of them particularly interesting1, but have changed to ‘yes’ over the off-season.
The final straw was my current laptop repeatedly running out of memory while trying to do analysis of NRL stats dating back to 1999. It is also becoming increasingly clear that having a laptop with a functioning battery would improve my productivity several-fold by untethering me from power points. A top of the line laptop is - inexplicably, in my opinion but I am getting old and don’t understand inflation - over $5000. Even something more mid-range is not an expense I can readily justify, unless part of the cost is offset by my loyal readers.
So that’s where I’m at: I think The Maroon Observer is good enough in quality, you can provide some financial support that would directly help keep the operation going and I would greatly appreciate that.
Here’s the breakdown. The free subscriber will get:
The weekly Maroon Observer newsletter (this one will always be free)
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Thank you for your time.
Expansion II
On the other side of the world (Perth), things seemed quite low when Peter V’Landys SENSATIONALLY REJECTED Peter Cumins’ Western Bears bid by THROWING THE ENTIRE STATE IN THE BIN.
Then, not so much news, as commentary from Peter Cumins, with some emphasis added by yours truly:
"We said to the NRL when we submitted our counter-bid that it was valid until December 20,” Cumins said.
"That has come and gone and we wrote to the NRL to say we were out of the race.
“The investors have looked at other opportunities. You don't have that sort of money and not have it working.
"We wrote to the NRL and said that we had done all this work, had an agreement with the North Sydney Bears, agreed on logos, club names and had registered and trademarked them.
"We said that was all available to them if they want to recompense us for the money that we have spent.
"The only advice we got back from the NRL was that they had decided to go down a completely different business model and ... were going to go with a model of an NRL-owned team supported by the government.”
If there’s one thing that gets Peter V’Landys out of bed each morning, it’s the opportunity to get access to tax payer funds. He is far, far too horny for government money for his own good.
Still, would a government-funded NRL-operated Western Australian team be a better prospect for professional rugby league in Perth than the assembly of relatively unknown businesspeople Cumins had concocted for the Western Bears? Probably?
The previous administration operated the Titans and Knights after their owners went bust and managed to get around $11 million for the pair, so it’s not like this is going to be a hugely lucrative opportunity for the NRL (PVL’s expectations may be otherwise) but it’s going to be a much more stable base on which to construct the boldest expansion opportunity since the Western Reds. Having the NRL tied in deep will avoid a lot of the complications that were thrown at Perth, that Melbourne didn’t endure under News Corp’s aegis, and starting a team in Perth will have enough complications as it is.
Say it quietly but are they on the right track? Maybe. Whether they’re now getting more right than wrong, that remains to be seen.
Cumins owning the IP for the Western Bears, which he will only relinquish in exchange for compensation, might lead to a very funny lawsuit but it’d probably be easier to buy him off. Or just jettison the Bears altogether? Let’s go West (Australia)-East (Brisbane) Bengals.
Intermission
The majority of rugby league fans who did not watch the Patriots dynasty (or that year with the Bucs): uh ¿’Gronk’?2
Same energy:
Gronkular. Gronkulicious. Gronktastic. Gronktioning.
Gronk.
NYC Mark II
Readers of SSWOS will know that I read The Club: How the English Premier League Became the Wildest, Richest, Most Disruptive Force in Sports over the summer break, as one does. Here’s an interesting quote:
Even the highest levels of youth football had long been a frustration for clubs because players were kept in narrow age groups. The same occurred with reserve-team football, which imposed strict limits on fielding players over the age of twenty-three. All of which meant that young players never faced more mature, battle-worn competitors. In other words, their experience was worthless.
While the book cites the roles the academies at Man U and Arsenal play in their respective golden eras, and the theme of the book is how irrational the entire Premier League is, the book also highlights the statistically more significant number of imitators (West Ham) that failed to win with the same strategy. The passage is followed by a description of the success of City Football Group’s approach in developing players: sending them to sister clubs to play against professional men, just not the kind of men that can play in the Premier League, and hone their skills.
I was a little perplexed to read that a committee had (once again) killed the idea of a draft but was still recommending a competition for younger players, say under the age of 21, that would be national in scope. Wait, didn’t we do this already?
Newscorp:
“Delivery of an U21’s competition will deliver parity across all NRL clubs and provide the four QLD-based clubs the opportunity to nurture and assess talent in a competition involving all their NRL counterparts,” the report says.
“This would also facilitate the ability for emerging talent within these clubs to remain with, or closer to, their families while developing in the pathway. Although aspiring to win premierships and player development are not mutually exclusive, it was suggested the main focus of teams competing in the competition should prioritise development and create an environment that is more conducive to the long-term development of athletes.
“It was also felt this competition could provide an entry point for expansion clubs, and emerging regions to fast track their pathways and development of their organisations.”
Hmm, whomst to believe? What if I was to tell you that the NRL had a decade of prior experience they could draw on and still decided to terminate the exact same competition last decade? And that, other than the NRL now funnelling a lot more money directly to clubs, nothing has really changed since then that would overcome the original reasons the competition was terminated? In 2014:
One of the problems plaguing the current NYC tournament is the exorbitant running costs.
This round alone, six U20s teams – the Bulldogs, Tigers, Roosters, Eels, Raiders and Storm – will travel interstate, while the Sharks head across the Tasman to take on the Warriors.
The travel and accommodation costs are a huge impost to clubs, many which are already struggling financially. Under the new system, there will be huge savings almost all games will be played along state lines.
The overhaul will also address concerns that many talented youngsters were leaving the game if they didn't transition straight from NYC to the NRL.
Another concern about the current system is that the best young players aren't on show in the under-20s anyways, as those poised to get a call up to first grade were being blooded against seasoned players in the NSW Cup to prepare them for the rigours of the big time.
Even before the NYC was introduced, there were concerns that it wouldn't serve its purpose.
Back in 2007, Des Hasler predicted it would be a "glorified SG Ball competition", with fellow coaches Wayne Bennett, Neil Henry and Ivan Cleary outspoken about their preference for blooding their gun juniors in the open-age competitions.
Player welfare was one of the reasons for the NYC was put to sleep but it’ll be better with a reintroduced comp? The clubs can afford it now, so they want to bring back the glorified SG Ball?
It’s almost like these people don’t know what they’re talking about. Or the previous lot didn’t. I don’t know.
I’ll be frank that my interest in under 20s footy is now strictly limited to the U19s Origin and I will defer the rest to the Rugby League Observer. This does not strike me as an existential threat to the Queensland statewide clubs that I might have once taken it as and that would have been the main reason I would take any interest in this at all.
The guys that will play in a hypothetical U20s competition are not the guys that would play in Cup. But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? The hypothetical stars of the future are either good enough to bypass the minors and head straight for the majors - Isaiya Katoa being a pretty recent example but guys like Payne Haas and Brandon Smith also barely played Cup - or they’re not good enough to compete with the Guy Hamiltons and Jack Ahearns of the world and have to be ringfenced, which immediately diminishes their prospects. The same pathway confusion, that a prospect goes from the Broncos to Souths Logan or Wynnum Manly on their way back to the Broncos, remains unresolved.
A revived NYC may be a milestone on the road to National Reserve Grade but the timing strikes me as the more important thing here. There’s a broadcast deal to be negotiated. Can any broadcaster interest be found or manufactured and converted into paying for a NYC and tipping more money into the clubs’ coffers? My guess is no and presuming it even finds broad support among the clubs in principle, without a source of funding or a great deal of broadcaster interest, the NYC2 should find its way into the same dustbin as the draft.
Either that, or the clubs have too much money and instead of bolstering their financials with the current windfall are planning to piss it away on a competition that likely doesn’t have a mainstream audience. You can look out the window and see less explicable things happening in the world right now. If there’s a bite at Nine or Netflix or DAZN, then there’s already an established set of justifications and it can happen.
Hmm, not unlike PNG.
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Reads
Johnathan Liew: Viva la vida: Hull KR’s rise to Grand Final and a revolution built from the ground up
The Roar: Records, hoodoos, myths and oddities: The secret history of the Brisbane Rugby League (weird that the only really good writing on the BRL is on The Roar)
John Davidson: Hero worship and false Messiahs
QRL dot com: Gorman’s famous jersey comes to rest at QRL, 100 years on
Craddock: Push to honour Queensland rugby league’s mysterious Phantom of Lang Park, Alex Watson
Rugby League Writers: Old-school rugby league breakdown: Kiwis v Australia in 1985
Raiders fans’ takes on NRL jerseys: Sezer’s Palace and The Sportress
Notes
The Wests Tigers thing was funny but not that interesting. Returning to the reporting to spin up some chuckles was actually deathly dull, especially after I wiped Chammas’ greasiness off the copy. When the whole thing came to a screeching halt with the appointment of a few independent directors, it seems Shane Richardson was right that it was a civil war within Holman Barnes Group (owners of the Wests leagues clubs) that had spilled over into the much more public-facing and much more heavily scrutinised Wests Tigers’ boardroom. At the end of the day, I just don’t think anyone really cares about debentures. Still, I was feeding off the potential for a de-merger into ‘Their ambition is to see the Magpies replace the Wests Tigers’ and the Balmain Tigers/South Island Kea. A real missed opportunity for my fellow chaos sickos.
‘In a rare personal insight, V’landys opened up about the impact of the workload on his mindset and wellbeing. “Sometimes it’s really hard,” he said. “I don’t expect sympathy because I put this on myself.’ Lucky for you because no one is going to give you any. I also like the use of the word “rare” when this seems to be trotted out annually.
I watched the Moonlight State, the Four Corners reporting that blew the lid on corruption in Queensland in the 1980s and makes Brisbane look a lot cooler than it has any business being. This is general interest, rather than rugby league, although turns out that Bob Bax and Barry Muir paid off cops in their role as bookmakers. I picked up Bjelke-Petersen’s memoir at Lifeline Bookfest for $1 - I refused to pay more - the other day, so I look forward to finding out how many screws loose that guy had. I also bought biographies of other fine Queenslanders like Kevin Rudd (same questions as Joh, tbh), Darren Lockyer (unbelievably long) and Wally Lewis (expecting some problematic content).
Selected signatures: Castleford sign Papua New Guinea hooker Rimbu, Adrian Trevilyan joins the Northern Pride and Ricky Leutele and Anthony Milford join Souths Logan.
Brains: Study links depression, outcome of sports concussion
Valentines in the Saddle: A Brisbane Broncos & Western Clydesdales Dinner. Could the Broncos and Clydesdales be joining forces? Eyes emoji.
I am well off (but I have two kids and a mortgage, so not $5000 laptop well off). I do this for fun and money would make it into work. I just repeat news gathered by other people, it’s neither that great nor that hard. Unless I have x number of subscribers, it’s not worth doing. Etc, etc.
I am aware he did this last year as well.