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Super League will get worse before it starts getting better
John Ledger looks back at 2008 and offers a damning verdict on the nation's top competition which failed to prepare its players for the task which awaited them in the World Cup.
NO amount of sweet talk from Sky or hard sell from the sport's administrators can quite mask the stench of failure that will follow rugby league into 2009.
For all the strides being made at grass-roots level, the steady success in widening its geographical boundaries and the burgeoning popularity at the turnstiles, rugby league's real state of health was put into sharp and painful focus in the recent World Cup in Australia.
England's miserable showing in the tournament Down Under offered damning proof that, 13 years after its inception, Super League is a failing competition. And, worryingly, a competition that is going to get a lot worse before it starts getting better.
With two new clubs, Salford City Reds and Celtic Crusaders, joining Super League in 2009, it is inevitable that standards will slip still further as an already slender supply of talent is spread even more thinly.
A scrambled win against Papua New Guinea was as good as it got for England in Australia, where the inherent weakness of a near full-strength squad exposed as a myth the claims that the gap between Super League and the NRL is closing.
The Super League champions may be able to beat their out-of-season Australian counterparts in the one-off World Club Challenge but on the level playing field that is the international arena England's best were shown to be inferior in almost every single way to the cream of New Zealand and Australia.
In the eight years that elapsed between the 2000 World Cup and the tournament which marked the centenary of the sport in Australia, standards in Super League have slipped alarmingly. Indeed, compared to what happened in the World Cup in 1995, the year before the summer rugby revolution began, it could be argued that Super League has had a calamitous impact on the fortunes of the national team.
Many of the players who represented England in Townsville, Melbourne, Newcastle and Brisbane appeared hopelessly out of their depth and it is against those displays that the performance of Super League as a whole should be measured in 2009.
It is not the players' fault, for they are mere products of clubs that have tolerated, and in many cases propagated, mundanity through the short-term thinking that has been their modus operandii for much of the last 13 years.
Unfortunately the best players in this country ply their trade in a division that lacks the intensity of Australia's NRL, where competition for places is cut-throat. Contrast that with Super League, which this year could offer up just one international standard scrum-half for England and provided coach Tony Smith with a dearth of options in other positions.
That 15 of England's 24-man squad were drawn from just two clubs, Leeds and St Helens, says much about the inadequacies of many of their rivals, all of whom must share the responsibility for World Cup failure.
For much of 2008, just as had been the case in 2007, Super League was a two-horse race and it is difficult to see the sport's 'blingiest' trophy ending up anywhere other than Headingley or Knowsley Road come next October at the end of a season which ends with an "innovative" new top-eight play-off system.
The formula, which was announced earlier this month, sees the highest-placed team after the first round of play-offs getting to choose their next opponents. There is, as yet, no suggestion that the lowest-placed team will have to play their next match in tutus and stilettos but as slapstick appears to have replaced hope at the bottom of the post-World Cup Pandora's Box then anything is possible.
The timing of such a silly gimmick could not be worse. If the idea was intended to raise a smile from the gloom that has descended since the World Cup, it failed badly.
Super League has made great strides in many areas but what is needed now is substance, rather than more style, especially off-the-wall style.
The official inquest into what went wrong in Australia continues and it is unlikely that any action on its findings will come in time to bring about the improvements needed to make England more competitive in the Four Nations Championship that will be staged in this country in the autumn.
Before then, Super League enters its first season under the new licensing system which guarantees all 14 clubs top-flight status for at least three years. That security should allow clubs to devise and implement strategies for the mid- and long-term, a situation which has been largely alien for many because of the dread fear of relegation.
Unfortunately the first year will see Super League's entertainment value dulled by the introduction of two clubs who, for now, possess squads and facilities which do little, if anything to enhance the competition.
Outside Super League, the National Leagues must come to terms with life without promotion and further develop their own identity, a process which has slowly been taking place for a couple of seasons.
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