Rugby League World magazine in the UK has Leeds Rhinos lock Kevin Sinfield as the best Rugby League player in the world.
Laughably, when the same magazine named its “best team in the world” last month, Kevin Sinfield wasn’t even in it!
There is no way at all that anyone with any interest in Rugby League could honestly suggest that Kevin Sinfield is the best player in the entire world. For Rugby League World to name Sinfield as such shows utter contemp for their readers. The people that run that magazine should be ashamed of themselves for treating their readers like a bunch of idiots.
It is interesting when you read the Rugby League print media in England at the moment. Most print journalists (And I use the term journalists lightly) have zero interest in informing their readers of the reality that the game faces in Great Britain. They are too busy pretending they work in public relations. Most simply write what clubs or players want them to write. They talk up players, they gloss over issues the game faces and they allow ridiculous opinions to go completely unchallenged.
These are the type of people who have allowed Rugby League in Great Britain to crumble into the mess that we see today. With a compliant media pushing out the party line, the Rugby Football League and its clubs have been allowed to run the game into the ground completely unchallenged. No one is made accountable. No hard questions are ever asked. Everything is fine….nothing to see here!
In what was the worst season of Super League that I can remember the Leeds Rhinos fell over the line with a couple of good games when it actually mattered. i would even suggest that the 2012 season wasn’t in the top five best seasons of Kevin Sinfields career!
This “golden boot” award has always been a complete pile of shit. From the complete disregard to New Zealand players, the fanciful idea that so many English players are better than their Australan counterparts, the ridiculous justification from certain voters for some of the votes they have cast and a list of winners that is laughable…
It really is about time that a publication like Rugby League Week looked at blowing these stupid award out of the water and name its out best player in the world each year.
It might maybe a handful of people in England feel warm and fuzzy to run around and pretend Kevin Sinfield is the best player in the world. It might make good copy for certain publications over there with tiny circulation, but the reality is that British Rugby League fans are not stupid enough to think that Kevin Sinfield is the best player in Super League, let alone the best player in the world.
Rugby League World magazine either thinks its readers are a bunch of morons that don’t know any better, or they realise that so few care about this announcement that they might as well have a bit of fun with it.
Either way, I can think of better things to spend you money on…
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The Rugby League press in England is really the only Rugby League press in England and there is a certain element of custodianship in the way they present the game. And frankly even though the Australian game is covered in Rugby League World and papers like League Express British fans only really take notice of down under when we are about to play them.
Given the fact no one else is covering Rugby League here it is no use promoting Australia in a World Cup year. 95% of the British sporting public have never heard of the Kangaroo’s. Benji Marshall could sit astride Nelson column and the headline would only be ” Some random tourist insults national hero”.
Again frankly if we don’t put players like Kevin Sinfield at the top of the tree to give the game a boost here there are no other voices. That one promotion however disingenuous might just put 1000 bums on seats or 2000 TV’s tuned for the England games in the World Cup. Might just get a couple of inches in a broadsheet as no one is writing in other papers capable of giving an opposing view.
You make some very good points. That is all smoke and mirrors stuff. The problem with that is, most people have stopped buying into that rubbish. They’ve been promised a decent contest before and spent good money to watch GB/Eng get smashed.
I dont think most of the British sporting public would know there is a World Cup on this year. Pretending Kevin Sinfield is the best in the world won’t change that. All it does is crush the game in Englands when the test team get smashed, which always happens.
It is smoke and mirrors and except for a few maybe’s it won’t change anything but “most people” when it comes to British RL are only club RL fans, and we feel a sense of custodianship too. We will watch GB or England simply because it is a scarce International opportunity. We don’t care about smoke and mirrors because we are turning up anyway for the chance. Kevin Sinfield will be the first player a wider audience have heard of since Offiah, Davies and Hanley and only because we made some noise about him.
Here if stars like Bradley Wiggins (the nations darling) say something about RL on national TV we get excited because we are linked with a cyclist that has a national profile. The goal for Australia is to be World champions, the goal for Britain aka England is to try and make some noise about RL that will last. And frankly the measures needed to do that for real, taking on a $billion set up from Australia are out of our pocket and maybe our administrations gambling instinct.
But this isn’t the way to do it. The way you make real noise on a national level is to give something of real interest to the nation. What do you think happens when “new” fans tune in to watch the “worlds best player” get slaughtered by Aussies and Kiwis? They will never back up again. While youre trying to sell garbage to new fans, youre losing established fans.
Look at the last year for the England team. They were lucky to play in front of 10,000. When youre not good and youre not winning, youre not making news. Lying about the games standing in the UK is like fools gold. It looks great for a while, but it has no real value.
Yes this is true. These are gimmicks, no money required gimmicks. And no doubt if we destroyed Australia it would do us no harm. It might get us the BBC Sports personality of the year award, team category. But real RL noise is very easily sidelined in the UK because of a tradition of being ignored. We talk about International success being the problem but subconsciously we know the real problems. And I’m beginning to believe that the real decisions required to bring our competition up to your level are out of our pocket, out of our influence , out of the ability of our admin and the return on the investment won’t result in recognition and us staying in the black. International success is great and a bonus but we know the real return on it here.
If we won the WC and at the same time Soccer was linked with shrinking penis disease and hyperbole was banned from RU commentary then RL would be onto a winner.
Awarding Sinfield the Golden Boot just smacks of insecurity from the British RL media (aka some blokes in a small Yorkshire village). You only have to read their messages on social media sites to see that they dislike how much praise the NRL gets and how much the Aussies are talked up.
They can’t accept that the NRL is miles ahead of Super League, that the Aussies are miles ahead of England because it makes their fawning over their favourite British Super League stars seem misguided.
I also suspect that they thought it would be good marketing for the world cup to tell everyone that England have the best player in the world in a desperate attempt to make it seem like England have players who can match up to their Aussie rivals.
There’s no objectivity in picking Sinfield for the golden boot, he was just chosen because some Yorkshire hacks love him and think he should have more recognition, even if it means making their own award seem completely ridiculous.