NSW Blues and Queensland Maroons hard to separate ahead of upgraded Origin which sets the scene for expanded NRLWThursday night kicks off a big year for women’s rugby league. For the first time, women’s State of Origin becomes more than a standalone game, before an expanded NRLW featuring 10 teams takes flight next month.While the upgrade from one Origin game to two is an improvement on previous years, it has left plenty of players and onlookers unsatisfied. New South Wales prop Millie Boyle has been particularly outspoken about the decision, saying a two-game series “seems ridiculous” and “doesn’t really feel fair”.Follow the 2023 Women’s State of Origin series opener in Parramatta with Guardian Australia’s minute-by-minute live blog. Kick-off on Thursday...
The cricket deals offered in India and recent financial developments in other sports are progress of a kind not seen beforeIt was only a few days ago that members of the Australian women’s cricket team were contemplating how best to navigate the impending “distraction” of the inaugural Women’s Premier League auction, scheduled during the first week of the T20 World Cup. “It’s a little bit awkward,” captain Meg Lanning said in South Africa last week. “But it’s just trying to embrace that and understanding it’s actually a really exciting time and you actually don’t have a lot of control over most of it, so you’ve just got to wait and see.”What a pleasant distraction it turned out to be. Lanning...
One team have undergone an incredible metamorphosis while the other have simply allowed combinations to settleIn March this year, the Newcastle Knights finished their first NRLW season with a loss to the Gold Coast Titans. It was their fifth defeat of the five-game season and was far from an illustrious entry to the competition.Fast forward six months and the Knights are heading into the grand final as favourites to win their first premiership, in one of sport’s more remarkable turnarounds in form. How did such a transformation come about? For it was not simply that the change happened from one season to the next, but also that, due to the pandemic, the seasons occurred so close together – both falling...
Australia’s relatively early investment in the domestic competition, which enters its sixth season this weekend, will be notable in a World Cup yearAlthough it is only 131 days since the Sydney Roosters and St George-Illawarra Dragons contested the last NRLW grand final, a new season is about to kick off. With the 2021 season postponed to the start of this year due to the pandemic, NRLW players are backing up only four months after they finished last season to do it all again.It may seem jarring, but for the players the short turnaround is a small price to pay for another season on the field and the increasing professionalism of the game. With the postponed Rugby League World Cup taking...