That was the World Cup that was

[undyingking]

Well, England's World Cup is over, and a pretty chastening experience it's been. They scraped past Papua New Guinea in the first game -- fair enough, adjusting to climate etc. They were crushed by Australia in the second game -- fair enough, Australia are the heavy favourites. Then they were beaten convincingly by New Zealand in the third game -- oh dear. And then they were beaten by New Zealand again, not quite as convincingly but still quite so, in the semi-final. This is the same New Zealand who England beat 3-0 just last year, when Tony Smith's arrival as coach was greeted with hosannas. Every game was marred with English handling and positional errors, and some of our alleged major talents (Sinfield, Price) didn't perform at all, while others (Senior, Morley, even Wellens) seem now past their best, without the same quality of young players coming through. In general you would have backed this England team to lose to any of the strong Super League teams, which is a bit of an indictment of the quantity of foreigners in our club rugby. Gardner's been brilliant for St Helens outside Gidley: Burrow and McGuire have created wonderful tries for Donald at Leeds. But surrounded just by Englishmen, the effect is not at all the same.

Rugby League is in danger of becoming a joke sport at international level, if it isn't already. The World Cup was delayed for four years to give England and NZ a chance to catch up, then rigged as heavily as possible to try and make it into a contest, but it failed -- Australia have still waltzed through without breaking a sweat. We can only hope that NZ somehow manage to give them a game in Saturday's final: but realistically, a scoreline of 40-6 or something like that is probably par.

Comments

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Things like netball, volleyball and handball (I guess water polo too) are a bit of a mystery to me -- for all I know there could be huge international competitions going on all the time, just unreported in the media I follow. So for me they could be anywhere from 5 to (Lots - 2). (Which is admittedly a bit of an academic distinction ;-)

I think I would put League above gridiron though, just because at least it does actually have frequent international competition, among several different national teams. Even if mostly one-sided, I think the organization of those must be a big tick in the "genuine international sport" box.

Another discriminator might be "in how many countries are there fully professional teams?" League can manage 4 (5 soon if you count Wales) -- gridiron the USA, Canada and Japan only? Although on that basis, I don't think there are any professional field hockey teams in the world at all. Hmm.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

I agree: American football is in no sense an international sport, and I say this as a fan.

For one crucial thing, there is no international agreement what the rules are: the pitch size and scoring system are different between NFL and CFL. There is no international organisation representing the sport, unless you count the NFL itself.

So even if you wanted to have an international match, you'd have to somehow form two national teams and agree the rules of the encounter.

That said, the NFL may well have fans in more countries than League does. I'm pretty confident more non-Americans watch the Super Bowl than people watched the world cup final. But that's just distribution: on those criteria you could argue that 24 is an international TV show.