Accentuating the positive

News of Paul Wood's misfortune in the Grand Final has gone mainstream. All the dailies are carrying the story with the general air of awe and sympathy matched by Wood's own stoicism. But alongside that, there's a nasty undercurrent, the general gist being "if that was a footballer, he'd never have played on".

Has it come to this where the Rugby League public is so unsure of itself that it needs to exploit one man's testicular misfortune to make a petty point about... who knows what at the expense of players in a totally different code?

Yes, diving in football and feigning injury to gain an advantage are the hot topics du nos jour, but to suggest that footballers would act any differently to Wood is specious nonsense. It also paints fans of the thirteen-man game as the stereotype would have it; with a chip on both shoulders. It does the game no favours. Football has it's problems, but attempting to jump on those and seek to exploit them with a straw man argument about someone losing a part of their anatomy is downright bizarre.

It happened during the Olympics too, with athletes lauded for, ostensibly, not being footballers. It's difficult to know why or what point was trying to be made. The point is that footballers are under far more scrutiny than any other sportspeople. Their on-field and off-field conduct is pored over in excruciating detail in all the national dailies and while there are a number of deeply unpleasant characters in that game, so there are in others. By the same token, there are a much greater number of characters that aren't deeply unpleasant. Moreover, to laud an athlete from a different game simply for not being a footballer is an infantile argument that also undermines the actual achievement that one would be seeking to praise.

As far as Rugby League goes, talking up the positives is absolutely fine and Paul Wood's is a story that has universal appeal. While we're not as big a sport as football, we can get away with pushing that line rather than Ben Blackmore getting convicted of assaulting Father Christmas being the major talking point of the week. In football, both would be big news spread across a number of back pages. With limited room for Rugby League, it's lucky that Wood's misfortune, courage and good humour have bumped what would otherwise be an embarrassment to one side.

By all means, seek to push the good side of our game. There is much to celebrate. But having a needless and cheap shot at a different sport while doing so undermines the point and comes across badly. And neither should we ignore those issues that aren't so positive and get all uptight when they're reported. We can't have it both ways

Anyway, Phil Babb (from ages ago) and Lukas Piszczek (from last weekend) reckon anyone attempting to make a ludicrous point about footballers not carrying on after suffering a hugely painful blow is dead wrong.

Pre-empting the next few weeks

I don't make predictions and I never will - Paul Gascoigne


I'm not a predictions man either, but I have a feeling that the rugby league fan with access to the modern day equivalent of a green pen - the internet - will shortly be organising with letter-writing campaigns and perhaps even a petition. And I predict the reasoning is thus:

Waah waah waah, no rugby got mentioned on the tellynews.

It's been noticeable that the coverage of rugby league in the national dailies has diminished, often to the point where even agency copy of a brief match report is seen as a big deal. This has been an ongoing process as newsrooms slim down in the face of their parent companies inability to make giving all their journalism away for nothing on the internet pay the bills.

Similarly, TV newsrooms have been going the same way. I could make a political point about the current government's ideological opposition to the BBC, but it doesn't feel like the right forum. What is undeniable though is that the license fee has been frozen while the BBC are expected to do more. Something had to give. Consequently, the potential outlets for rugby league news have become more limited.

But during major international tournaments, of which we have two in quick succession, those outlets become even more restricted. Rugby league and plenty of other sports have to shout very loudly to be heard above the noise and, frankly, an England game against a made-up entity that doesn't actually mean anything isn't shouting all that loudly. Simply put, the next three weeks is about football. You may not care about football, but thousands - millions - do. After this, there are the Olympics where a month is occupied by sports that nobody really cares about for the other 47 months of the Olympic cycle dominate the headlines.

What it isn't is a conspiracy. It's just a prioritisation of effort towards the most likely revenue-generating content. However passionate you are about rugby league, a modicum of self-awareness will tell you that. Football is not out to destroy everything in it's path, however much it tries to make it look like that. It's simply dominant in the marketplace. Join in if you like. Play the office sweepstake, go for a beer down the pub in front of the humdinger that Germany v Netherlands promises to be. Paint your face if you want to take it way too far. Or ignore it (difficult though that may be). Just spare me the incessant whinging about how football had nine pages in this morning's paper and rugby league only had a couple of column inches.