The future of sport is in the Middle East

When the burly honchos of the Rugby League World Cup gushed about taking the game to new heights, no one was actually thinking about the Golan Heights – but that’s where we are. What sounds like a fascinating quarter–final takes place on Friday (as I write) when the dominant team in global rugby league, Australia, take on Lebanon in Huddersfield – the birthplace of the game.

Amid the blizzard of sporting world cups currently taking place across the globe, this match has it all. The Lebanese team, known as the Cedars, are coached by Australian Michael Cheika, one of the world’s most eminent coaches and a former boss of the Wallabies’ rugby union side. That’s an awful lot of rugby in the mix already. And in an eye–watering bit of multitasking, after the game in Huddersfield, Cheika sets off for London where the rugby union team he now coaches, Argentina, will be England’s opponents at Twickenham on Sunday. That’s what you might call a busy weekend.

The Lebanon team have been largely forged in the western suburbs of Sydney, where there’s a vast community of Aussies of Lebanese extraction. So if the team’s players sound as if they’ve spent more time in Bondi than Beirut, that’s because they have. Cheika’s parents are Lebanese immigrants and they are immeasurably proud of what he has done. ‘They have always supported me throughout my life,’ he said recently, ‘and I think my mum will be Lebanon’s biggest fan. She’s taken all of this to heart. Lebanon is a huge part of my life.’

Elsewhere in the Middle East, Qatar might not be everyone’s top destination, and it is a mighty questionable choice of host, but it is in just the right place geographically to put on four games a day at times that suit football hotspots round the world.