Let’s show them

By KEVIN PAMBA
What do we need to do to get more players into the Australian National Rugby League? Do we have players who can fit into the Australian game? Or are we good for ourselves only. There’s no doubt we have the talent.
Missing though is the NRL link. We have not helped ourselves with bad press, innuendo, stereotyping and administrative ineptitude at various levels of the local game and this has suppressed the exposition of the talent that is in this country.
Much has been said and written about the administrative issues at the PNG Rugby Football League (PNGRFL) that led to a quagmire which spurn out of control from November 2009 onwards. The matter remains unresolved but the autonomous Digicel Cup competition has been running unperturbed.
PNG’s domestic “semi professional” competition (which is now sponsored by Digicel) that started 22 years ago in 1990 has the unfortunate record of exporting only one player in Marcus Bai to the NRL.
 Bai made it to the NRL in a roundabout way, though. He was not a beneficiary of any talent identification system in place between the PNG competition and the Australian clubs. There has never been one.
The West New Briton went to Australia in 1997 via Britain where he was first picked by the Hull Kingston Rovers and played for them in 1996.
Bai, who used to play for the Port Moresby Vipers along with fellow Kumuls Stanley Gene (Goroka Lahanis) and John Okul (Lae Bombers), was selected by Hull KR when the PNG team was there for the World Cup.
He made his way to Australia via the now defunct Gold Coast Chargers club in the New South Wales Rugby League (NSWRL) competition, the predecessor of the compromised NRL.
In 1998, Bai became one of the foundation players of new Super League club Melbourne Storm during the height of the game’s ownership war between the Australian Rugby League and News Ltd-sponsored Super League.
Before Bai, there were two other Kumuls in Dairi Kovae and Arnold Krewanty who had stints with Newcastle Knights in the NSWRL between 1988 and the early 1990s.
Since Bai retired several years ago, no other PNG player has been recruited by  the NRL, although a few had brief trials with feeder clubs. This is after 22 years of PNG running a semi-professional rugby league competition and more than 60 years of Papua New Guineans playing the game that the Australians taught them and they now regard as their national sport.
The NRL talent scouts don’t come to watch the Digicel Cup finals to identify talent, let alone keeping contact with managers of the game in PNG for the same as they are doing with the Fijians, for example.
The Australian talent scouts are focusing their attention on the small Pacific Island nations who have been exposed to rugby league much later than PNG.
Fiji, better known for its prowess in the rival rugby union, is the current destination for NRL talent scouts. The focus there is on Fijians playing in the local Vodafone Cup competition, their equivalent of the Digicel Cup challenge. West Tigers were the most recent club to recruit a player from the Vodafone Cup in the form of mid-season buy, Marika Koroibete.
The Australian media reported at the weekend that South Sydney Rabbitohs are the latest NRL club to hunt for talent in the Vodafone Cup competition.
According to RLCM online the Rabbitohs recruitment manager Mark Hughes was at the Fiji National Rugby League Vodafone Cup finals in Suva last Saturday.
Hughes was quoted as saying that some Fijian players had been earmarked by former Fiji Bati Wise Kativerata and former Fiji Bati coach Jo Rabele.
“We have two identified by Wise and the rest by Rabele here that we are looking at and the best one will get an opportunity to go to Australia,” Hughes had said.
“I just have to see if he is ready or no and if he is then we are good to go and if not then we will wait for him to be ready,” he said.
Hughes reportedly said that whichever players were chosen would first be placed with the under-20 development programme of the Rabbitohs.
“In that programme, the players play in the National Youth Championship (NYC), and that team is the feeder team to our main squad.
“So if the selected player was to impress us in the NYC then he will be moved up into the main side to get a shot the NRL jersey.”
Hughes said more clubs in the NRL were on the lookout for Fijian talent after the rise of players like Akuila Uate, Sisa Waqa and Marika Koroibete.
“Who knows how many Uate’s and Koroibete’s are in Fiji, we don’t know and that is why we are coming here.
“I am looking forward to coming here more often because from what I have seen, there is abundance of talent in Fiji,” he said.
According to RLCM online, Hughes and Kativerata had known each other for the past 16 years and both have been helping each other find talent. Kativerata, a former Fiji Bati who finished his NRL career with the Rabbitohs is now helping his former club recruit his countrymen to follow his footstep.
Notice that Hughes was in Suva as a result of his prior contact and working relationship with Fijian rugby league identities, Kativerata and Rabele.
Notice also his revelation of the high regard Australian clubs have of the current Fijian players in the NRL and they anticipate more talent to be unearthed for them via Fiji league’s Vodafone Cup competition.
The proactive linkages that now exist between the Fijian rugby league managers and NRL clubs flies in the face of the annual ear-bashing that hits PNG shores this time of the year that: “Rugby league is the national sport of PNG and Papua New Guineans love their rugby league and idolise NRL players”.
Will NRL talent scouts be at the annual Prime Minister’s XIII match between PNG and Australia at the Lloyd Robson Oval on Sunday, for a change?