4 Ways to Fix International Rugby League – Part 4

By Daniel Andruczyk

Today Tours are discussed and how they fit into the grand scheme of things with the four year cycle and finally a summary of the last week of blogs.

Tours

Now I will say this once more, I personally feel that the Traditional tours should be done away with. If we are serious about getting international rugby league running that is… but this is for another blog. However there are many, many fans on all the forums that want the tours so I still made a provision for them, and envisage how they would work.

So in reality there would only be four nations that seriously could mount tours and that would not be involved in the first round of regional championship qualifiers. Those would be the the traditional big four nations of England, Australia, New Zealand and France.

If we take 2014 as the first year post the 2013 World Cup – which is held in the UK – then I would have France and England tour to Australia and New Zealand. So it would be a six weekend tour where the first three weekends you have Australia and England play out an Ashes series and the French and Kiwis play out a series. They then swap and Australia and France can play for the France-Australie Trophy and England and New Zealand for the Baskerville Trophy. All quite straight forward really. If there are any other games the touring nations want to play on the way they can.

The next touring year would be 2018. Here I would have Australia tour through New Zealand and some of the PI nations. It would be a three test tour with the Kiwis for the Trans Tasman Trophy. France and England would have 3 tests as well with the French touring and playing the UK countries and Ireland.

In 2022 it would be the reverse of 2014, where you have Australia and New Zealand travel to Europe to play the English and French plus any other matches they would want.

In 2026 it would be the reverse of 2018. What this Schedule does is that it makes the tours worth something again by making them as quite rare events, only coming round every 16 years in a cycle. Now when you think about it its not that unprecedented, in fact in the other rugby code the British and Irish Lions tours only come round every 12 years to countries. So in Australia we only see the B & I Lions every 12 years.

So there it is a tour schedule to fit in… but I think in reality with players in the NRL and ESL talking about burn out then I think these years should be left to give a bit of respite for the NRL and ESL players.

Summary

Over the last several days, I have shown a fairly detailed outline of what I feel needs to be done to help fix Rugby League internationally. Instead of just talk though I have tried to explain and give examples where possible to show how it would work indeed.

Just to recap in brief the 4 ways to fix the sport internationally:

1. Unifying the rules – have everyone round the world play to one set of rules. Not the three we have now.
2. Eligibility rules – These need to be tightened up. The actual criteria aren’t the issue they are no different to other sports, its just that they are not enforced properly.
3. Professionalising the RLIF and the structure of the sport – The RLIF needs to have a set of independent, full time professional personnel to run the sport, to drive the money, and run the pan-regional tournaments like the World Cup. Underneath that regional federations need to be set up to set up regional sponsorships and tournaments.
4. International Schedule – A meaningful set of international tournaments that give an opportunity for all nations to strive and achieve the highest levels of the sport.

I truly believe that if these four things can be fixed then the sport will be in a much better and healthier state and have much more respect all round.

Daniel Andruczyk’s email: info@rugbyleagueinternationalscores.com .