This new three-match series brings the cream of Serbian rugby league to the top... of an empty stadium.

Prior to the 1980s, the Australian rugby league interstate representative series between New South Wales and Queensland saw players represent the state where their current club was based. This meant that, as Queensland produced top quality players but had much poorer clubs than the rich Sydney teams, many native Queenslanders would be forced to pull on the blue NSW jersey and compete against the maroon QLD shirt of their homeland.

Queensland's frustration led to the birth of the State of Origin concept in 1980, which pitted "state against state", but also "mate against mate", with players from the same rich Sydney clubs competing against one another in a ferocious contest over three 80-minute battles.

Growing up in east Hull, rugby union was always something alien, but also something distant. Indeed, I think it was only when a PE teacher at Andrew Marvel High revealed that he played union for one of the village teams around Hull that I realised the sport even existed in my home county. Here in Serbia, however, the union is like a wasp feeding on the sweet league.

My first run-in with its loyalists came in the summer of 2011 when I got a phone call from a guy I hardly knew who used to play for the team: "Mark, some guys will turn up at your training session tonight. They're good guys and they want to form a Red Star rugby union club. Please be nice to them."

continued from part 1:

According to physicist Tom Campbell's interesting Big TOE (Theory Of Everything), "We are individuated units of consciousness in a greater consciousness system and we evolve individually over many incarnations in this and other virtual reality sub-systems by lowering our entropy through love (manifested through empathy and collaboration). The opposite of love is fear (manifested through selfishness, a sense of ownership and competition), which increases our entropy and causes us to de-evolve".

As Yoda, the great Jedi Master, said "Fear leads to anger, anger to hate, hate to suffering."