IT beggars belief that there are still people in rugby league who believe tomorrow's game at Adelaide Oval is a waste of time.

I would have thought that in these enlightened days when everyone (aside from the Queensland Rugby League) agrees with the necessity of an independent commission that simple mathematics would compellingly prove the opposite.

Rugby league is fighting AFL, soccer and another game I can't quite recall the name of over the attention and lucre of 22,413,867 people. About 1,622,700 live in South Australia. There are only six state capitals - where television ratings have the most significance - and the NRL currently has a presence in just three plus Canberra.

Use any model you like from around the world of professional sports and to suggest a competition as big as the National Rugby League should have no interest in one of the few major centres in a sparcely populated continent is pure gibberish.

In fact, the Canterbury-Melbourne game on Saturday at 7pm (get there, South Australians!) is one of the most important played this year because after years of healing in the wake of the Super League War, rugby league is on the move again.

It has got by without an expansion plan for almost a decade and a half now but with the Independent Commission coming on line in November (clasp hands and look to the sky, readers) and the AFL moving into Gold Coast and western Sydney, there should be a strategy drawn up some time in the next 18 months.

That strategy will be shaped by games such as tomorrow's.

The crowd at Christchurch two weeks ago (20,721) indicated the Warriors should play more games outside Auckland. The attendance the night before in Perth (13,164) indicated talk of the Reds returning in 2013 had done little to increase interest in WA since the corresponding game there a year ago.

Whitaker, a former Balmain hooker, was bombarded with questions afterward about the Rams' future. He dead-batted them all - but we all knew the Rams would be dead in less than six months.

I felt sick in the stomach that night. The crowd was 7038 - comparable to what Balmain was attracting at home at the time. A team on death row had flogged a traditional side before an enthusiastic crowd which had probably gone home sadly deluded about the Rams' future. The victors vanished and the vanquished survived.

When the Rams folded, it was front page news in Adelaide. That, to me, was compelling evidence that enough people cared and they shouldn't have folded at all.

Hopefully, one day, it will be front page news again when they are back.