State of Origin players Karina Brown, right, and Kiwi Vanessa Foliaki, featured in an image posted to the NRL's social media accounts. Photo / via Facebook
The NRL was widely praised for its response to an image of two female players kissing after a match over the weekend.
But that one action — posting on Facebook "Welcome to 2018 … can't wait for you to join us" after a few nasty comments — is just the start of what the code needs to do to pull itself into the future and attract a new audience, writes news.com.au's Alex McKinnon.
The game is up against other sports trying to attract new fans. The AFL in particular, has encroached on its heartland in recent years with the growth of the Western Sydney Giants.
The NRL is in a tricky position.
The sport of rugby league — traditionally seen as quite blokey — can't afford to lose it's current audience.
But it will have to do everything it can to attract a new crowd.
Over the weekend, the NRL made a huge effort to reach out.
There was the first official women's State of Origin. Any leery blokes attending that game intending to poke fun would have been swiftly shut down by the size of the crowd in North Sydney.
💙 ❤️ ️ Women's Rugby League #OurWay
Posted by NRL on Friday, June 22, 2018
The atmosphere was electric, with the players feeding off the crowd's energy, aware something special was unfolding.
NRL chair Peter Beattie watched from the sidelines, fielding the occasional sledge from punters asking him where the Sharks are from. He said the game had surpassed even the high hopes he held in the lead-up.
"It's been too long coming. Any game in 2018 that doesn't have a large involvement of women in it doesn't have a future," Beattie said. "I know there are some traditionalists who don't necessarily share that view, but I think everyone who loves rugby league will look at this game tonight and see it for what it is. This is not any tokenism. The level of enthusiasm and the quality of the game are fan-bloody-tactic. June 22, 2018 is a turning point for the game."
The NRL's heavy promotion of the game drew praise, as did its response to fans upset at a photo of State of Origin players Karina Brown and Vanessa Foliaki kissing. But it will take more than a few Facebook posts to overturn the NRL's image as one defined by endlessly rolling player scandals, a love of "biff" and a toxic boofheadedness that excludes anyone without a crew cut and a beer gut.
Even as the code steps up its efforts to reach out to women, indigenous people and Pacific Islanders, the NRL still has a long way to go.
It is difficult to reconcile the organisation's supposed commitment to women with its support for players like Jarryd Hayne, who has been charged with rape in California.
They've also continued to let players charged with domestic violence offences take the field.
The debatable ethics of the code's heavy reliance on alcohol sponsorship was highlighted by a study last week showing a spike in domestic assaults on State of Origin nights.
Nor has the brave new NRL yet translated into a living wage for female players. At the post-State of Origin press conference, Blues captain Maddie Studdon revealed she had been forced to resign from her job as a stevedore to focus on football just days before the game. As players in the AFL women's league continue to secure pay increases, Studdon's financial straits show how far the NRL still lags behind.
One night after the women's State of Origin, 60km across the city, more than 17,000 people packed into Campbelltown Stadium on a freezing Saturday night for the Pacific Test Invitational. It was another display of passion for the game from a group of people the code has historically neglected — those of Pacific Islander and Papuan background.
A total of 46 per cent of all NRL players are of Pacific heritage (another 12 per cent are indigenous), but that has been slow to translate into successful Pacific-based teams or strong Pacific Islander representation in the code's higher reaches.
Tia Roko, who is overseeing the addition of a Fijian team in the NSW Intrust Premiership Cup competition, is one of just a handful of Pacific-heritage CEOs, both in sport and across wider corporate Australia, which is still overwhelmingly white. When she was appointed in April, she noted that "only 2 per cent of administrators are Polynesian" across the code.
In June last year, former NRL player Joe Williams called for Footy Show host Paul Vautin to be sacked after he joked that an Aboriginal audience member would spend prize money on alcohol. Two months later, a Matty Johns Show segment, "Footy Kids in Cars", drew controversy for making fun of Pacific Islander players' names.
White commentators' mangled pronunciation of players' names, or even the names of countries like Tonga and Samoa, have done little to promote a robust and growing rugby league culture in the Pacific. Nor has the insistence that teams with predominantly dark-skinned players win games through size, speed and aggression, rather than intelligence, skill and game management.
The defection of players like Jason Taumalolo, Manu Ma'u, David Fusitu'a and Andrew Fifita from the New Zealand and Australian squads to play for Tonga at last year's Rugby League World Cup was blasted in many corners of the rugby league press as a selfish move, despite the fact that the players surrendered superior pay, training facilities and likely success for the opportunity to represent the nation of their heritage.
Rugby league's old guard would have rather seen another boring, Australia-dominated World Cup than see a so-called "second-tier" nation like Tonga provide a genuine contest. The Tongan side that convincingly beat Samoa on Saturday night, and the red-and-white army that cheered them on, earned their new status as a rugby league heavyweight in the face of that entrenched opposition.
It's a shame Pacific Islander and PNG fans, as well as former players like Petero Civoniceva and Joe Galuvao, have had to work so hard to see their love for the game recognised. Leah Ongugo travelled from Newcastle to see Papua New Guinea's national team, The Kumuls, win an upset victory on Saturday over Fiji Bati, while her sister flew from Port Moresby. She believes the NRL has only begun to tap the potential of what PNG can offer the game.
"Rugby league is the thing that unites the nation," Ongugo says. "It's a country with different tribes, different clans, different languages, but rugby league is the thing that unites all people together."
Even as the NRL grapples with how to remain relevant in a changing world, the fans it ignored for so long are showing the way forward. The stars of the halftime show at North Sydney Oval were the Blacktown Bears under-10s squad, who won the Junior State of Origin for NSW against Queensland's North Ipswich Tigers.
As the Bears took a victory lap around the ground, the crowd stood and applauded. The future of rugby league is already here, whether the boofheads are ready or not.
The Warriors' second-rower has been recalled for Queensland for State of Origin game 2.