The Warriors no-good, very bad, terrible weekend

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Warriors fans would do well to take the long view this week. Getty Images

The Warriors were so bad on the weekend I almost felt bad for them, but not as bad as I felt for the industry I still kind of call home.

Hamstrung by a halves pairing that was by some distance the lowest functioning of the four NRL teams on display in Vegas, the Warriors were embarrassed on the narrow confines of Reliant Stadium: outplayed, outkicked, out-thought. They played with all the shape and verve of a team in their first pre-season hit out and while there are still at least 1840 minutes left to play this season, unless they can magic up a world-class playmaker in quick time, they could be long minutes.

The game, however, felt secondary to the whole exercise, which was the as-yet undefined idea of cracking America. There was no need for the NRL and its imperial leader Peter V’landys to define it because there were enough journalists drinking the Kool-Aid. I don’t know which ones were on company dime and which were on junkets, but most of the copy read like the latter.

I’ve been on “sponsored” assignments before — off the top of my head, All Blacks Tours footed my bill to go to Ireland and London on the 2014 end-of-year tour, and Duco funded a trip to Providence for Joseph Parker’s heavyweight bout with Alex Leapai in 2019 — and it is difficult to maintain journalistic integrity. In fact, I don’t think anybody really expects you to, but that being the case, I still don’t think I’ve seen as much unfiltered hype emanate from one sporting week as I saw from Las Vegas. Guernseys being seen on the Strip. Whoop! We’ve got it covered.

Since landing in Las Vegas last Tuesday, the atmosphere across Sin City has been palpable. You could barely walk along the Strip without seeing a rugby league shirt or a former player wandering along.

It would have been far more entertaining if somebody had just gone into full Hunter S. Thompson gonzo mode. He might have been more than 50 years early, but Thompson nailed the NRL’s weekend in this one paragraph from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

“Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.”

What did it mean, apart from the NRL giving thousands of New Zealanders and Australians the opportunity to tap into their retirement savings and enjoy a few days in Sin City?

The NRL is not going to ‘crack’ the United States. There might have been a few more thousand in the crowd than last year, but they were mostly travelling fans and the upper bowl was still mostly empty seats when the insipid Warriors played the Raiders.

Is the NRL trying to access new betting markets? Possibly, although the American gambling market is in flux, with ESPN Bet’s $2 billion play for a slice of the market about to hit the rocks in embarrassing fashion.

Is it for sponsorship and commercial reasons? Possibly, although it’s been a ratings bonanza in Australia, the television numbers in the US for the inaugural weekend were so low it could not even be described as negligible.

Around 61,000 tuned into Manly-South Sydney while 44,000 watched the Roosters and Broncos, which is well below the threshold of 100,000 viewers for profitable sports broadcasting, according to TV ratings experts Sports Media Watch in the US.

It’s difficult to see these number jumping significantly enough for US corporations to invest in advertising around it.

More likely, the NRL were hoping the splash in Vegas was loud enough and rippled far enough to attract US investors looking for an ownership stake in the sport. It is a popular investment play in the US at the moment. Think John Henry at Liverpool, Todd Boehly at Chelsea, Stan Kroenke at Arsenal, Tom Brady at Birmingham, Ryan Reynolds at Wrexham and Bill Foley at Bournemouth, as just a few examples.

NRL boss Peter V’landys, who was satirised as sitting atop Caesar’s Palace in a toga while balancing a Steeden on his finger in a cartoon in the News Limited papers, will be looking at those names, and that of Egon Durban, who has invested in the All Blacks through his Silver Lake vehicle, and wanting a slice of that action.

He’ll look at Foley and wonder why he was attracted by the relative obscurity of the A-League and the outpost that is New Zealand, rather than a sport that dominates Australia’s eastern seaboard.

There is a lot of questions that remain defiantly unanswered by the NRL’s trip to the strip, but if I could speak for Foley for a just a minute: if he watched the performance of the Warriors and compared it to the 4-4 barn-burner involving his Auckland FC at Mt Smart on Saturday and thought, “Nah, quite happy where my money is at right now.”

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