It’s the 79th minute of the Grand Final and Jonny Lomax hits Blake Austin with a high shot.
It’s clumsy not malicious as his forearm bounces up from Austin’s chest. But he is sent off. Lomax traipses off, the second red card of the game after Mikolaj Oledzki was sent packing minutes earlier for accidentally catching Tommy Makinson around the head as the winger skidded low before contact.
Neither players are dirty, neither player has a history of appearing before the disciplinary and yet both will face bans. And crucially, both key players will miss England’s World Cup opener against Samoa. This is hypothetical of course. I’m no Mystic Meg.
But there is potential for international players on both sides on Saturday to miss out on key games in the tournament because of a domestic club offence. Papua New Guinea and Tonga will be keeping a close eye on the likes of Rhyse Martin and Ignatius Passi. All of which is absolutely farcical. We’ve waited a long time and an extra year for this World Cup on our shores, the sport’s showpiece event where the world’s greatest players do battle.
And yet because of rugby league’s ability to shoot itself in the foot, we risk losing them before a ball is kicked. It’s the same Down Under. Nathan Cleary, James Taumalolo, Jarome Luai, Dylan Brown, Alex Johnson - all are playing NRL semi-finals this weekend. One slip and Australia, Tonga, Samoa, New Zealand and PNG - and the tournament - could be robbed of box office stars.
The Kiwis have already lost Jared Wareah Hargreaves for the first two games of RLWC21 after the Sydney Roosters brute was sin-binned in defeat to Rabbitohs. He copped a three-match ban and will serve the first when they take on Leeds as a warm-up game. So the tournament suffers while his club doesn’t. The nature of the sport is that the better players will invariably be playing for the more successful clubs so are more likely to still be playing at the business end of the season.
Which brings us to John Bateman. His high tackle on Aidan Sezer in Leeds’ semi-final victory over Wigan was dumb but not dirty, more a product of frustration than malice. Yet because the game is cracking down on tackles to the head, and rightly so, Bateman received a three game ban.
Hours before he copped that ban Bateman was named in the England Knights squad. That’s right, a previous England captain named in the B team for a game he would never play in just to strike off one of those matches. A second would be the England friendly against Fiji. Do the RFL realise how pathetic this looks?
I appreciate England are just playing by the rules but it’s about as Mickey Mouse as a sport can get, not least by devaluing all those other players genuinely representing the Knights. Back-row is the one area England have genuine depth. Even after losing Liam Farrell to injury, they can call on Elliott Whitehead, Joe Batchelor, Victor Radley and Kallum Watkins if he’s not needed at centre (which he will be).
There’s Morgan Knowles too, another who walked an end of season tightrope after copping a two-match ban and risked even more when St Helens went down a very frivolous appeal route. But Bateman would have been in the team, this is a Shaun Wane team after all, so now England are one more player down for an opening game they need to win. Lose to Samoa and they will likely face Tonga rather than PNG in the quarter-finals - and that’s rather unpleasant.
There are anomalies and I appreciate it’s a bad look if a player is sent off in a club game for something really nasty, a Ben Flower moment, and then trots out in his country’s colours soon after. But those instances are truly rare and if it’s the price we pay to avoid this ridiculous situation then so be it. Rugby league isn’t like rugby union where internationals keep arriving like bad Prime Ministers.
Since November 12 2018 the England rugby league team have played just three games. Their union counterparts have managed 46.
So when international rugby league does get its moment in the sun it needs to shine, common sense needs to prevail and in future football’s lead should be followed. If you are sent off in the Premier League it doesn’t impact on you playing in the Champions League or internationally. Simple, eh? And so before the next World Cup in France 2025, somebody should bang the game’s collective heads together and sort out this mess.
Punish the player and punish their club too - not the international team and rugby league’s stuttering international calendar. Just three years’ notice then to sort this out. What’s the odds on that happening?
