{"id":492966,"date":"2026-02-20T18:38:10","date_gmt":"2026-02-20T18:38:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/492966\/"},"modified":"2026-02-20T18:38:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T18:38:10","slug":"how-the-world-cup-schedule-should-have-looked-total-rugby-league","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/492966\/","title":{"rendered":"How the World Cup schedule should have looked \u2013 Total Rugby League"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

IN THE last issue of Rugby League World I wrote about this year\u2019s World Cup and criticised several things about it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t feel happy about doing this, as I would love nothing more than to be entirely positive about every aspect of the tournament.<\/p>\n

But in all honesty, if I had gone down that route I would have been quite dishonest.<\/p>\n

The World Cup\u2019s launch in November was so low key as to be almost invisible. And it still is.<\/p>\n

For example, just before Christmas I was reading a sporting preview of 2026 by an Australian sportswriter in one of the Aussie dailies. He often writes about rugby league. But the World Cup didn\u2019t get a mention.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, rugby union\u2019s World Cup, which will be held in Australia in 2027, has been widely written about in the Australian media.<\/p>\n

The Australian Rugby League authorities clearly don\u2019t know how to generate interest in the tournament. Or perhaps, for some reason, they don\u2019t want to.<\/p>\n

In any event I suspect that the late launch of the World Cup draw, less than a year before the tournament is due to kick off, has ensured that far fewer English supporters will be making the trip to support their team than if the details had been released a year earlier.<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t just the late launch and its underwhelming nature that I complained about.<\/p>\n

There were four other things that I don\u2019t think have been done well.<\/p>\n

First, there is no guaranteed game between England and Australia.<\/p>\n

Second, there are no games in Canberra, the Australian capital city, or in Melbourne or Auckland.<\/p>\n

Thirdly, the pool stages seem contrived and hard to understand.<\/p>\n

Fourth, there are too many potentially one-sided games in the pool stages, and not just in group A.<\/p>\n

When International Rugby League (IRL) decided that there would only be ten teams in the 2026 World Cup, that immediately caused difficulties for the organisers, who would have to create a viable structure for a tournament that would last five weeks.<\/p>\n

They decided to split the ten qualifying nations into a group of four and two groups of three. And in doing that, they\u2019ve created the problems I\u2019ve outlined.<\/p>\n

To be fair, when faced with ten teams in the tournament they may have thought that they had few alternatives in terms of creating pool groups. After all, splitting ten teams into three such groups had been done before in the 1995 World Cup in England.<\/p>\n

But there is a more sensible alternative with ten teams to create a competition with more exciting games, if we are restricted to three pool games, two semi-finals and a final.<\/p>\n

The best approach is to organise all the teams into a ten-team single league table with the top four clubs after three games going through to the semi-finals.<\/p>\n

But the competing teams shouldn\u2019t be organised randomly.<\/p>\n

Instead, the eight pre-qualifying teams should initially have been ranked in the order of the recent world rankings released by the IRL.<\/p>\n

They would therefore be ranked in the following order: Australia, New Zealand, England, Samoa, Tonga, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Lebanon.<\/p>\n

The two qualifying teams, France and the Cook Islands, could be added to the list in that order in accordance with their world rankings.<\/p>\n

So how would three fixtures for each team be created?<\/p>\n

My proposal would be for two fixtures to be created by the pendulum system that has been used for the Championship competition in 2026.<\/p>\n

And one fixture could come from a seeding system.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take Australia, as the top ranked team as an example. On the pendulum they would play teams 2 and 3 \u2013 New Zealand and England. Their third fixture, under the seeding system, would see them playing the Cook Islands, who would be team ten.<\/p>\n

England, as team 3, would play teams 1 (Australia) and 5 (Tonga) in pendulum games, and team 8 (Lebanon) in the seeded game.<\/p>\n

The full list of pool matches would be:<\/p>\n

Team \u2013 Opponents
Australia \u2013 England, New Zealand, Cook Islands
New Zealand \u2013 Samoa, Australia, France
England \u2013 Australia, Tonga, Lebanon
Samoa \u2013 New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Fiji
Tonga \u2013 Fiji, England, Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea \u2013 Lebanon, Samoa, Tonga
Fiji \u2013 Tonga, France, Samoa
Lebanon \u2013 Papua New Guinea, Cook Islands, England
France \u2013 Cook Islands, Fiji, New Zealand
Cook Islands \u2013 France, Lebanon, Australia<\/p>\n

And when it comes to venues, the obvious first game in the tournament should have been Australia v England in Perth.<\/p>\n

Bearing in mind that the World Cup will be played just a few month before the newly created Perth Bears enter the NRL competition, a clash between the old rivals would surely have been an obvious tournament opener at the Optus Stadium and it would surely have attracted a full house.<\/p>\n

On the same weekend New Zealand could have played Samoa in Auckland, ideally at Edan Park and again in front of a potential full house.<\/p>\n

PNG could have played Lebanon in Port Moresby, while France could have played the Cook Islands, perhaps in Townsville or Canberra and Tonga could have played Fiji in Sydney.<\/p>\n

All of those games would have been exciting and none of them would have been expected to be walkovers.<\/p>\n

Each team would face a major challenge to make it to the semi-finals.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always thought that a close game of rugby league is the best sport in the world.<\/p>\n

But a one-sided game is terrible.<\/p>\n

I suppose it\u2019s too late now for the IRL to put my plan into action.<\/p>\n

First published in Rugby League World magazine, Issue 517 (February 2026)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"IN THE last issue of Rugby League World I wrote about this year\u2019s World Cup and criticised several…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":492967,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":["post-492966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-rugby","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=492966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492966\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/492967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=492966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=492966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=492966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}