Sydney is spoilt for choice when it comes to live rugby league. The plethora of games available to locals is almost cinema session-like as far as choice is concerned. Don’t like the next game coming up for your team? All good, there’ll be another one next week, or at the worst, in a fortnight’s time perhaps. Anyway, the team down the road has a game on this weekend. We can always go to that …

Yesterday’s fixture at Allianz Stadium, which your author attended as a fan, was the ultimate example of the oversupply of the code in Sydney. Here we had the minor premiers from the last three seasons, the Sydney Roosters, taking on last year’s premiers the North Queensland Cowboys. Star power in spades. Four-time Dally M Medal winner Johnathan Thurston for the visitors, the beloved Mitchell Pearce on show for the home side, as well as a host of other Origin and international reps and exciting youngsters across both squads.

That only 8760 people showed up says two things: the locals have well and truly dumped their boys for another year, and that they thought watching them against the team that won the comp last year would be as much fun as (insert your own witty line here).

Eastern suburbs-based Roosters fans can go and see live sport of any kind whenever they want. Many of them are probably Swans and Waratahs supporters as well. When Easts are done in a few weeks, the A-League will be there for them to watch. Then there will be cricket of all flavours played across the summer which they can walk down the road and consume at the Sydney Cricket Ground.

This is all a far cry from footy fans’ lot out at Campbelltown, who have had to ration three or four home games each season since the merger of their Western Suburbs Magpies with the Balmain Tigers in the early 2000s. Normally the Wests Tigers vs Gold Coast fixture, like the Roosters/Cows event, is a low-drawing match, but throw in the star power of The Hayne Plane, and the fact that hardly any footy is played at the former Orana Park any more, and a bumper crowd of 16,783 rocked up on Saturday.

Low-drawing games are unavoidable, particularly as each side has to play each other team at least once, and the dreaded post-work Thursday night timeslot needs to be filled. But these fixtures, especially the ones played at 40K and 80K venues, don’t need to be the empty eyesores broadcast across the land which they’ve long proven to be.

That Roosters/Cowboys game would have been eaten up and well appreciated by a Wagga, Mudgee or a Coffs supporter base. It would have looked a treat on television and it would have given something back to bush supporters who, on average, buy just as many jerseys and pay TV subscriptions as their cousins in the city.

In recent seasons Penrith has turned potentially low-drawing home games against teams like Cronulla and the Titans into absolute celebrations of bush footy by playing home games at Bathurst. Similar scenes have resulted in Parra’s trips north to Darwin. Of course, there are club ownership and sponsor commitments behind some of these ground rearrangements, but more NRL games which the city fans don’t appreciate need to be taken to the bush.

If every Sydney club looked through the draw and chose two matches which they knew weren’t going to pull a proper crowd, and then contacted a regional council to see if they were interested in hosting a game, imagine the possibilities … Oh, the small matter of the cost of all this? That’s cool. Didn’t the game recently sign a $1.9m broadcast deal?