And no it's not 'will Queensland win for the next 1035 years?' The question revolves around scheduling - is the current format, that witnesses games played on a Wednesday night at three week intervals, the best one?
Players selected miss playing for their clubs, the people who pay their salary, the weekend before the game each time and must pull up injury free to turn out for their clubs the following weekend. Usually the bye saves each club once from the pain of taking the field without their best but that's it.
While I admit Wednesday nights have been successful and are now a huge part of Australia's annual sporting calendar, being forced to play without your team's stars when you are battling to make the Top 8 is tough on players, coaches and fans alike.
Surely there is a better solution.
We could start by making all players available for their clubs the week before a dead rubber, as is the case this week with QLD already up 2-0.
I would go even further and make radical changes. Under my rule the series would be played on three consecutive Saturday nights. Players would turn out for their clubs the week before the series starts and have a normal week to recover at the end of the series before they don club colours again. While the series is on there will only be one round of club footy the entire time - the first two weeks could have a game on Friday night, Sunday afternoon and Monday night, before a Friday night, Sunday afternoon weekend the final week.
That way, at most teams only miss their players once. Each team would still get two byes, albeit they would be closer together.
The elite that are fortunate enough to play Origin would not have to back up and play twice in a weekend either, they would simply miss their allocated byes or weeks off. Sure it's hard but that's why they get paid the big bucks!
Some will say that these guys need longer together to form combinations and so on but I don't buy it. Most have played together at some stage of their careers or will be together for a while to come. They have the ability to follow a game plan well and mesh with teammates with ease - that's why they are the best in the game.
All sounds good to me in theory but there is one HUGE problem. Television!! The television rights holders, Channel 9 and Fox, want the game on the box as often as possible so just two or three games a week is not going to cut the mustard for them or their advertisers who obviously help them recoup the millions they have paid the NRL for the broadcast rights.
I would imagine hell would freeze over before the networks agree to a schedule like mine but that brings us to another big question in the game - who is running the show - the media and television networks or the people who should, the fans?
I think we all know the answer to that one.
No comments:
Post a Comment