Rollo Manning has been a rugby tragic all his life since being named after a Wallaby winger and educated at a private boarding school in Sydney, Australia. Manning has been working in publicity and public relations for 40 years, and during that time has commented on the "game they play in heaven" through radio, magazines and newspaper coverage.
As a correspondent for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, he has broadcast in magazine style programs and live coverage of games. He is currently a regular contributor to www.scrum.com and radio shows in his hometown of Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia.
Manning has been contributing to eSports for six years and relishes the opportunity to express his views on the first of the two rugbies. He is currently completing work on a study of the inter play between rugby league and rugby union over the past 100 years, when league was formed as the professional arm of an otherwise purely amateur game.
Since 1995, both have become professional and the drift of players is going back from league to union. Where will it end? That is the question Manning is now asking himself.
This game is the first professional version of rugby that broke away from the traditional rugby in 1908. The players at the time were upset at not receiving payment especially if they were injured and so started to get paid.
A few rule changes reduced the number of players to 13 a side and the lineout to restart the game after the ball went out was replaced by a scrum. Also the "play the ball" replaced the scramble for possession after a player was tackled with the ball.
RL ? rugby league ? is only played in any great form in Australia where it is strong in the states of New South Wales and Queensland. It is there the dominant football code ahead of the longer standing rugby union, soccer or Australian Rules football. The southern states of Australia are a different story where Aussie Rules is trumps.
The rugby game that extols the title of "the game they play in heaven" is the big international and four yearly World Cup event that is the third biggest International sporting event behind the Olympic Games and the Soccer World Cup.
So try not to be confused. The game in Pennsylvania in December is the minority form of rugby world wide and a hybrid of the game keenly contested across the USA, with the National team competing well in the Rugby World Cup in Australia in November 2003.
The RL game also is played in a small part of England, the North Island of New Zealand and in Papua New Guinea.