Rugby League The Great Hope Of The Free World!

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pussycat Mark 11
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Rugby League The Great Hope Of The Free World!

Post by pussycat Mark 11 »

Washington Post
Opinion
Can this sport outmatch China in the Pacific? The West is betting on it.
Image without a caption
By Richard Glover
September 14, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EDT
Valentine Holmes of Queensland scores a try during game three of the State of Origin Series between the Queensland Maroons and the New South Wales Blues at Suncorp Stadium on July 13 in Brisbane, Australia. (Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images)

In the intense battle between the United States and China for influence in the Pacific, the West is preparing to deploy a brutal new weapon.

Rugby league.


The high-velocity, full-contact sport, featuring dazzling bursts of speed interspersed with what look like brief wrestling matches between players, is something that China cannot match. Enormously popular in Australia, particularly in the eastern states of Queensland and New South Wales, it’s even more beloved in the island nations of the Pacific. Nearly half the players in the Australian league now come from nations such as Samoa, Tonga and Fiji. And in Papua New Guinea (PNG), rugby — precisely, rugby league football — is the official national sport, a status it enjoys nowhere else in the world.

Hence the idea: Why not allow a rugby league team from the Pacific to join the Australian competition? A New Zealand team already belongs, so opening the doors to a team from PNG — or a PNG-based team made up of players from the many island nations — makes eminent sense.

In a meeting last week with her PNG counterpart, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong acknowledged PNG’s desire to have a club in Australia’s National Rugby League (NRL). “I think we want something very similar,” she said of the two nations. “We want a region in which sovereignty is respected, and I know you want a team in the NRL.”

The reference to sovereignty is a nod to China’s increasing push for influence in the South Pacific — a push that Australia contends will cost the Pacific island nations their independence. In that endeavor, not everything has gone China’s way. In May, 10 Pacific nations rejected a Chinese proposal for a multi-nation security pact. But elsewhere, Beijing has had success in both the Solomon Islands, which signed a security agreement in April, and Kiribati, which withdrew from the Pacific Islands Forum, the main diplomatic body for the region, in what at least one politician called a bid to please China.

In the effort to counteract Chinese sway, the idea of exercising a little rugby diplomacy seems only logical. Sporting and other cultural ties, after all, have long been a tool of “soft power” diplomacy, reaching back centuries to the first traders who crossed oceans to bring their goods and culture to distant lands. One purpose of the ancient Olympic games, in fact, was to spread Hellenistic culture throughout the Mediterranean region.

Bringing a PNG sports team into the Aussie league could have a significant effect. An Australian colony until 1975, the island fell in love with rugby league after it was introduced by Australian miners in the 1930s. The country’s representative in Australia, High Commissioner John Kali, was a rugby league player in his youth and knows his nation’s enthusiasm for the game. It has “a massive following,” he told me in a Sydney radio interview, describing a typical PNG crowd during the contest known as State of Origin, a three-game series that pits a team from Queensland (wearing maroon) against one from New South Wales (“the blues”). “In the villages, you have one television set, and there are thousands of people surrounding that one set,” he said. “Everyone is jostling for position, and they’ve got their own colours — maroons and blues — and they have a bit of a jostle here and there ... it’s just the spirit and feeling of getting together as a community.”

Papua New Guinea is building a case to place before the game’s Australian administrators. Andrew Hill, the bid’s lead consultant, hopes to have a club running by 2025, ready to field both male and female teams in the Australian competition of 2027 or 2028. “It would be a brave person to think that a Pacifica team, led by a Pacifica country like PNG, would not be a good thing for rugby league,” he told me.

Hill and his organization — the PNG NRL Bid 2025 — have one fresh advantage. Recently elected Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is firmly behind the drive. In an interview last week, Albanese told me he raised the issue with the sport’s Australian administrators and thought it important for “good relations in our region.”

An enthusiast for the game, Albanese supports the South Sydney Rabbitohs, a team saved from bankruptcy by the Australian actor Russell Crowe. Attending a Souths game was an early priority for Albanese following his victory in May.

I asked him the obvious question: What if he encouraged a PNG team and they went on to beat Souths? He laughed. “That would be okay by me, that’s sport,” he said. “And it wouldn’t be the first loss I’ve seen Souths have.”

A Souths defeat greeted with a laugh? It may be a measure of the role a footy team could play in blunting Chinese ambitions in the Pacific, and giving the West the upper hand.
Australia's number 1 sport RUGBY LEAGUE. Preferred by more Australians than any other :cheers:
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Re: Rugby League The Great Hope Of The Free World!

Post by Terry »

pussycat Mark 11 wrote: Fri Sep 16, 2022 12:32 pm
Washington Post
Opinion
Can this sport outmatch China in the Pacific? The West is betting on it.
Image without a caption
By Richard Glover
September 14, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EDT
Valentine Holmes of Queensland scores a try during game three of the State of Origin Series between the Queensland Maroons and the New South Wales Blues at Suncorp Stadium on July 13 in Brisbane, Australia. (Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images)

In the intense battle between the United States and China for influence in the Pacific, the West is preparing to deploy a brutal new weapon.

Rugby league.


The high-velocity, full-contact sport, featuring dazzling bursts of speed interspersed with what look like brief wrestling matches between players, is something that China cannot match. Enormously popular in Australia, particularly in the eastern states of Queensland and New South Wales, it’s even more beloved in the island nations of the Pacific. Nearly half the players in the Australian league now come from nations such as Samoa, Tonga and Fiji. And in Papua New Guinea (PNG), rugby — precisely, rugby league football — is the official national sport, a status it enjoys nowhere else in the world.

Hence the idea: Why not allow a rugby league team from the Pacific to join the Australian competition? A New Zealand team already belongs, so opening the doors to a team from PNG — or a PNG-based team made up of players from the many island nations — makes eminent sense.

In a meeting last week with her PNG counterpart, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong acknowledged PNG’s desire to have a club in Australia’s National Rugby League (NRL). “I think we want something very similar,” she said of the two nations. “We want a region in which sovereignty is respected, and I know you want a team in the NRL.”

The reference to sovereignty is a nod to China’s increasing push for influence in the South Pacific — a push that Australia contends will cost the Pacific island nations their independence. In that endeavor, not everything has gone China’s way. In May, 10 Pacific nations rejected a Chinese proposal for a multi-nation security pact. But elsewhere, Beijing has had success in both the Solomon Islands, which signed a security agreement in April, and Kiribati, which withdrew from the Pacific Islands Forum, the main diplomatic body for the region, in what at least one politician called a bid to please China.

In the effort to counteract Chinese sway, the idea of exercising a little rugby diplomacy seems only logical. Sporting and other cultural ties, after all, have long been a tool of “soft power” diplomacy, reaching back centuries to the first traders who crossed oceans to bring their goods and culture to distant lands. One purpose of the ancient Olympic games, in fact, was to spread Hellenistic culture throughout the Mediterranean region.

Bringing a PNG sports team into the Aussie league could have a significant effect. An Australian colony until 1975, the island fell in love with rugby league after it was introduced by Australian miners in the 1930s. The country’s representative in Australia, High Commissioner John Kali, was a rugby league player in his youth and knows his nation’s enthusiasm for the game. It has “a massive following,” he told me in a Sydney radio interview, describing a typical PNG crowd during the contest known as State of Origin, a three-game series that pits a team from Queensland (wearing maroon) against one from New South Wales (“the blues”). “In the villages, you have one television set, and there are thousands of people surrounding that one set,” he said. “Everyone is jostling for position, and they’ve got their own colours — maroons and blues — and they have a bit of a jostle here and there ... it’s just the spirit and feeling of getting together as a community.”

Papua New Guinea is building a case to place before the game’s Australian administrators. Andrew Hill, the bid’s lead consultant, hopes to have a club running by 2025, ready to field both male and female teams in the Australian competition of 2027 or 2028. “It would be a brave person to think that a Pacifica team, led by a Pacifica country like PNG, would not be a good thing for rugby league,” he told me.

Hill and his organization — the PNG NRL Bid 2025 — have one fresh advantage. Recently elected Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is firmly behind the drive. In an interview last week, Albanese told me he raised the issue with the sport’s Australian administrators and thought it important for “good relations in our region.”

An enthusiast for the game, Albanese supports the South Sydney Rabbitohs, a team saved from bankruptcy by the Australian actor Russell Crowe. Attending a Souths game was an early priority for Albanese following his victory in May.

I asked him the obvious question: What if he encouraged a PNG team and they went on to beat Souths? He laughed. “That would be okay by me, that’s sport,” he said. “And it wouldn’t be the first loss I’ve seen Souths have.”

A Souths defeat greeted with a laugh? It may be a measure of the role a footy team could play in blunting Chinese ambitions in the Pacific, and giving the West the upper hand.

Washington Post??? Wow!! We've hit the big time. The fumblers will be furious. But they'll always have the suburbs of Melborn lololololololol
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Re: Rugby League The Great Hope Of The Free World!

Post by Fred »

I think there is a good point being made here re: ties that bind and using RL to do so. Good article.
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Re: Rugby League The Great Hope Of The Free World!

Post by Quolls2019 »

Doomed I tell ya, we’re all doomed!!!,!
There are lies, damn lies and then there are ratings.
Rugby league, Australias most popular game in some of North Eastern Australia.
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