Blackhawks official says Pacific side would add to spectacle Islands cup team backed

A NEW team would only add to the spectacle of rugby league – not just for the fans but the players as a whole.

That is the opinion of Townsville Blackhawks football operations manager Adrian Thomson, who has backed the audacious bid to bring a South Pacific islands team into the Intrust Super Cup by 2023.

Laurent Garnier, a former coach with the Melbourne Storm, brought forward the concept last week for Pacifique

Treize to become the Queensland competition’s 15th side – representing the Frenchspeaking Pacific regions of New Caledonia and Vanuatu.

The hope is that a successful approach would tap into the South Sea Island population near Queensland’s coastline and provide professional pathways for them and France to make it at a professional level.

Former Blackhawk Samson O’neill and his family come from Vanuatu heritage, and including a team from those regions would inject a whole new flavour and style of football, according to Thomson.

He pointed to the success of the Papua New Guinea Hunters and how their way of playing football had enticed more fans to the competition, and inspired different brands of gameplay from the Queensland-based sides.

“A lot of people like the way the Papua New Guineans play – it’s physical, hard and their skill levels have improved out of sight just being in our competition,” Thomson said.

“It has been a great advantage to our clubs. The crowd pulling capacity they have and the different style of play they have – it’s that diversity that’s in society and it’s in our competition.”

Thomson said the exposure of these players to high level rugby league could also allow the international game to grow even more and enable other regions to develop in the same manner as Tonga have in recent years.

The Blackhawks only came into the ISC five years ago, and the challenges of getting off the ground are still fresh in the mind. Ultimately, Thomson said the most important factor was establishing a culture, setting a club structure and not wavering from it.

However he said, as was the case with the Townsville side, a new club would likely need strong backing in order to be largely self-funded in its infancy.

“They’d have to come in pretty well like the Hunters did with funding, most of it themselves in the initial stages,” Thomson said. “They’d have to have strong backing, we weren’t privy to who is backing them, but at the end of the day it would be self-funded a lot of it for a team to come in straight away – in this climate probably more so.

“I know one thing, the 14 clubs are all backing each other, we want everyone to be maintained and stay in the competition.

“We need to help each other out, we’re doing that with 14, so one coming in in a couple of years would have to come in at their own expense.”