The weight of a million pounds
Wolfpack’s rise through rugby league would be complete with a win
The Rugby Football League calls it the Million Pound Game, but there’s much more than money at stake.
Gareth (Gaz) O’Brien knows firsthand.
He played in a Million Pound Game two years ago with the Salford Red Devils, a Super League squad facing the HullKingston Rovers. A loss would mean relegation, costing the loser its portion of RFL revenue sharing, and voided player contracts, sending them scrambling for jobs with other Super League teams.
O’Brien, who now plays fullback for the Toronto Wolfpack, kicked a drop goal in extra time that preserved the Super League spot for Salford, and a measure of security for his teammates.
O’Brien will line up in his second Million Pound Game on Sunday when the Wolfpack welcome the London Broncos for winner-take-all playoff. The loser will spend another season in the second division, the winner will move to the Super League.
O’Brien says the stakes are a little lower this time. Since both teams come from the second division, the threat of wholesale contract voiding doesn’t loom over Sunday’s loser. But that doesn’t mean Wolfpack players are taking things lightly.
“There’s still pressure there,” O’Brien said Thursday. “They’re a dangerous team that like to throw the ball around, but we’re on home advantage and they’ve got to travel. We’ve got to try to make the most of that.”
Sunday’s game is the culmination of an annual round-robin playoff tournament pitting the Super League’s bottom four teams against the top four fin- ishers in the second division. The top three finishers have already secured their berths in the Super League. Toronto clinched its spot in the Million Pound Game with last Friday’s dramatic come-from-behind 17-16 road victory over the Leeds Rhinos.
Sports media in England are taking Sunday’s showdown seriously. Sky Sports demanded a 2 p.m. kickoff in Toronto so it could air the game in a premium Sunday night time slot.
The RFL, meanwhile benefits from a Super League qualifier between London and Toronto — two markets the league hopes to conquer as it seeks to gain traction outside the midsized markets in northern England where rugby league thrives.
“It’s two championship clubs, two expansion clubs. Both clubs have absolutely earned the right to be here,” Wolfpack head coach Paul Rowley said. “It’s got all the ingredients for a classic.”
Rowley expects the Broncos, who lost two of three matches against Toronto this season, to play a free-flowing and improvisational game Sunday. He expects his own team to enter Sunday with a thorough game plan and commit to it. Rowley says that approach helped in the Leeds win, with O’Brien again breaking a tie with a lategame drop goal.
The Broncos throttled Toronto when the clubs met in London early in the 2018 season. That 47-16 loss remains the most lopsided regular-season result in the Wolfpack’s brief history. But Toronto won the two subsequent meetings by a combined score of 66-34, and isn’t taking a third win for granted.
“I think we took them too lightly (in February). From then on in, we haven’t,” Toronto prop Adam Sidlow said. “If you’d have said at the beginning of the year that we’ve got London, at home, in front of our fans, massive occasion to get into Super League, each and every one of us would have taken it.”