League faces up to crisis Down Under

Letter From Sydney

When Mat Rogers, the brilliant Cronulla winger, announced his defection to rugby union last week, a shiver ran through Australian rugby league. Rogers is the second league international to switch codes this year, and his departure is a crushing blow to a sport lurching from crisis to crisis.

As union enjoys the limelight of the Lions tour, league is under attack on several fronts: vying for television audiences with union and Australian Rules and confronting the continuing fall-out from the creation of Rupert Murdoch's Super League, which saw old and well-loved clubs bite the dust.

League's image as a family game has also been dented by the John Hopoate affair, in which the Wests Tigers player was found guilty of sticking a finger up the backsides of opponents, and by the suspension of two of Hopoate's team-mates for taking recreational drugs. Crowd violence has also marred several recent National Rugby League matches.

Scandals can be weathered; what is more disturbing for the NRL top brass is that the game appears to be in terminal decline ­ with rugby union, once a minority sport in Australia, the main beneficiary. The latest statistics appear to confirm the trend. For the first time the total number of registered union players in Australia has overtaken league players ­ 127,800 to 127,400.

A degree of scepticism surrounds the figures, which are collated in different ways; however, both codes quote the same number of senior players ­ about 35,000 ­ and impartial observers are in no doubt that a seismic shift is taking place.

Rugby league is still the dominant football code in New South Wales and Queensland, and Aussie Rules reigns supreme in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. But union, once the preserve of a handful of ex-private schoolboys, is winning over increasing numbers of Australians, particularly in country areas.

Rogers' defection follows that of the Brisbane winger Wendell Sailor, and the Australian Rugby Union claims that any number of league stars are hammering at its doors. That may or may not be true, but it is certainly credible, since union offers not only riches ­ élite salaries now match those earned in league ­ but the chance to compete in a truly international sport.

One reason for the rapid rise in union's fortunes over the past decade is Australia's two World Cup wins in 1991 and 1999, an extraordinary achievement given union's peripheral place in the sporting landscape. Those wins raised the game's national profile enormously and inspired thousands of schoolchildren to take up union.

The other factor has been union's decision to go professional in 1995, which has made it six-fold richer and able to offer enticing salaries. The decision was taken in response to the advent of the Super League, with the ARU fearful that league would steal its best players. The move placed union on a sound financial footing. League is still trying to win back disaffected fans who resent the entry of big business into their traditional blue-collar sport.

Greg Hunter, the editor of Inside Sport magazine, believes domestic interest in union has at least doubled, possibly tripled, since the first World Cup win. "The momentum of movement is inexorably from league towards union, and not vice versa," he said. "We are moving in the direction of New Zealand, where union is played from the waterfront all the way to the top."

Strath Gordon, a spokesman for the ARU, is more cautious. "League is still a bigger mass entertainment game," he said. "You could fire a gun in some suburbs of western Sydney and never hit a union supporter. League is still very strong in its heartlands. But we're going places."

This year, the Waratahs, the New South Wales team, drew the biggest ever crowd ­ 35,000 ­ to a Super 12 game, and there have been crowds of more than 100,000 at Tests at Stadium Australia. In 2003 Australia will host the World Cup.

John Brady, of the NRL, scoffs at the notion that league is in its death throes. "Last year in Australia, league overall had some three million fans go to NRL matches," he says. "Union, including all the Tests and Super 12 matches, had 600,000 fans. League had audiences of a couple of million a week."

But Hunter believes the writing is on the wall. "Some people are already asking if there is any point in playing league," he said. "I believe it will dwindle to a minority sport in Australia, a curiosity akin to hurling in Ireland. It won't happen overnight, but it is inevitable."