Say what you like about the Easter weekend schedule having too many games, but it rarely fails to come up with the goods, producing matches that will live long in the memory of those who experience them.
This year, five different teams have topped the Super League table so far: Castleford, Harlequins, Huddersfield, Warrington and St Helens. We certainly appear to have travelled a long way from the days of the ‘Big Four’ who dominated the competition between them in its formative years. Even those clubs who find themselves near the foot of the table, though they lack consistency to challenge for honours themselves, still have it in them to claim the scalps of the frontrunners, as both Crusaders and Wakefield proved over Easter to the chagrin of Huddersfield and Castleford respectively.
Last season’s Champions Wigan have yet to hit the league summit, but their last gasp victory over Saints on Good Friday in front of a capacity crowd at the DW Stadium must rank as one of the games of this or any other season. Simply breathtaking entertainment that serves to remind us why we all love the game of Rugby League so much and helps to blow away the cynicism that can sometimes surround aspects of it in our minds.
We all have our own views on the merits of licensing, salary caps, overseas quotas and the rest of the rules and regulations which govern our sport’s premier competition, but just a few short years ago we could only have dreamed of a league capable of throwing out so many shock results, so many different clubs topping the table and with names like Castleford and Harlequins amongst them. Something, somewhere is going right, even though if you’re a member of a tipping competiton, as I am, you’re probably struggling to achieve any level of consistency too as one round’s big winners come an unexpected cropper the next.
Easter also brings out the crowds in record numbers with almost 85,000 fans watching the seven round 11 games on the Thursday/Good Friday and a further 65,000 turning out for round 12 over the Monday and Tuesday. That’s an average of almost 11,000 across the fourteen games played. It puts the Magic Weekend into some kind of perspective, but it demonstrates the enormous potential there is for Rugby League if only the genuine ‘magic’ of the Easter weekend could be replicated throughout the season.
There’s no doubt the holiday aspect helps draw the more casual supporters out from their armchairs as does the great weather of the kind we were blessed with this year, but there’s also something intangible going on too: games over Easter are transformed into unmissable events. The blanket television coverage helps to convey the excitement to a wider audience, rather than deterring those who are able to get to the game in person from doing so, as can sometimes happen at other times of the year.
It’s that wider audience Rugby League needs to engage on a regular basis. How could any sports fan, Rugby League aficionado or not, have failed to be thrilled by the spectacle on display over Easter. Let’s not be dismissive of the appeal of other sports, which is churlish and self-defeating (we won’t win over a football or rugby union fan by telling them what they already like is rubbish) but let’s be positive about the virtues of our own sport as it continues to develop and grow. It’s something pretty special and we shouldn’t be afraid of sharing it with as many others as we can.
JOHN DRAKE
First published in Rugby League World Issue 362 (June 2011)
