RUGBY LEAGUE WORLD CUP: Making the World Cup more accessible than ever

Tonight I'm layin' here but there's something in my ear sayin' there's a little town just beaneath the floodline needs a local hero - Local Hero 

This autumn the Rugby League World Cup is coming to our shores. Yes, the creme de la creme of league will be playing in stadiums all over Britain and Ireland (and one game in France). From Cardiff to Limerick and from Hull to Neath you will be able to catch a piece of the action wherever you are.

As the Lions picked up the trophy in Australia, Murray celebrated a Wimbledon final win and as London reminisced of last year's glory in the Anniversary games it seems that the rugby league World Cup has all but been forgotten. Pushed to the back of the sporting burner in favour of more nationally popular sports such as cricket and tennis. With back pages and websites plagued with football transfer stories it does not look like league will be having much national media attention for a while to come. The biggest hurdle for the players and the game as a whole now is not the world cup itself but selling the event to the people. Attempting to engage the population with this code that is incredibly popular in the industrial areas of the North.

With only 200,000 tickets sold - 300,000 less than the RFL had targeted with 3 months to go - there is certainly some work to be done in bringing the sport to the people. The general manager of the rugby league World Cup stated that they are not too concerned with the numbers at the moment and they are most definitely concentrating on making the game more accessible to the people - "We're not worried. One of the challenges is using a large number of areas, but we did that very purposefully. We're bringing an international sporting event to your back yard," she says. By holding games in all corners of the country it can only mean that the game's profile will be raised in areas such as south Wales and the south of England where Union rules the fields. 

Rugby league has changed a lot since the 1970's when it was a game that was neither here nor there. It has become a game of great athleticism and skill which is almost unrivalled in the world of sport and this is the message that RFL Chief executive, Nigel Wood, is attempting to spread to the people of Britain and Ireland. "People are taken by surprise because they've got stereotypical views of what it used to look like in the 1970s, on Grandstand on a Saturday afternoon with overweight forwards slugging it out on a quagmire of a pitch. But if you look now at the speed, the skill, the strength, the stamina of our athletes people are blown away by it. Particularly when you get a vibrant Friday night fixture under the lights on a green carpet of a pitch in front of a crowd with no segregation – I'd defy anybody to be more family friendly than our sport."

With tickets starting as low as £5 for students and £10 for adults they have made the game incredibly accessible to everyone. When comparing to the rugby union World Cup and Six Nations prices which reach £60 or £70 plus, the league tickets are unbelievably good value. The reason for this, as Wood explains, is because "rugby league tends to be busiest in the hardest parts of town. It's not necessarily the leafy suburbs where rugby league clubs flourish so in a tighter economy we have to be very mindful of that."

If you witnessed the Challenge Cup semi-final between Hull FC and Warrington Wolves then you could see that league is an exciting game filled with emotions. The last few minutes got everyone on the edge of their seats - including a neutral observer such as myself. With a Hull V Wigan final in Wembley on the 24th of August, the tension is not set to drop. What a game that could be!

With teams joining the tier beneath the Super League from outside the game's heartland areas such as Hemel Hempstead, Oxford and Gloucester, it just goes to show that league is going from strength to strength, despite the lack of media attention, as the world prepares to make its way to the British and Irish Isles this autumn to play some high quality rugby for old and hopefully new supporters.