Rugby League is a brutal, beautiful game. In amongst the collective, high-speed muggings exists a silent beauty where hand and foot combine to bewitch and bedazzle both opponent and spectator. It's a game that lets tough men have tough collisions, lets fast men run and gives room for only the most skilful to side-step and swerve, spin and pass.

The game was born amongst northern England's working classes 105 years ago. It's a game created, played, watched and ruled over by those who worked the coal-face and walked the factory floor. Yet for all the fascination and passion that those in Cumbria, Lancashire and Yorkshire have for what they modestly dub "the greatest game", it has never been exported with any success, with the exception of parts of Australia.

Rugby league is like dark mild or black puddings. All are savoured for their subtleties in their heartland, but put them on the back of a van and try to sell them to a foreign market and they are generally dismissed as unpalatable even before they have been tasted.

In this World Cup, rugby league hopes that minds will be opened, not just in Dublin and Belfast, but in equally unlikely outposts such as Edinburgh and Cardiff, Paris and London. Not to mention Reading, Gloucester, Wrexham and Llanelli. Those cities and towns will all play host to some of the 16 nations, one of whom will be crowned champions of a small, but hopefully expanding, rugby league world.

The brief and roughly accurate history of the game is this.

Before 1895 there was only one game called rugby, administered by Twickenham. It was an amateur sport, and while the (mainly) middle and upper class players in the south of England had little problem finding time to play the game they loved, the (mainly) working class players in the north of England found they couldn't afford to take time off work each Saturday. Injury in a game, in the absence of insurance, could lead to penury.

So several clubs asked Twickenham to award broken-time to players, compensation for the money they lost from their pay packets while they played the game. Twickenham, sensing a chance to oust the working class yobs from their midst, said "No", and so came the split.

In 1895, the Northern Rugby Union, eventually to be known as Rugby League, was born. To this day rugby league, at its highest level, is played almost exclusively across the same band of northern England as it was then.

The Welsh, with similar economic conditions, almost followed suit. But for one vote, the Valleys, too, may have been a rugby league stronghold these days.

They have been playing rugby league World Cups since 1954, but never with a geographical spread and desperation for a new audience as this. As at the turn of the last century rugby league was contemplating its new life, so at the turn of this century some fear it may be contemplating slow death. At club level, crowds are rising and the standard of play is at its highest for many years. But in an age when television audiences dictate the success or otherwise of any sport, so the game needs to broaden its appeal, and so it has broadened its horizons.

The Great Britain side, which normally plays its matches in Manchester, Leeds or Wigan, has been split into England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, playing their matches at all the previously mentioned capitals.

There may never be a club side in Dublin or Belfast, but playing here might induce a greater desire to flick the switch to a rugby league-showing channel when the domestic game kicks off again. Having had the chance to taste and relish the real thing, the mind may be open to watching it as a TV dinner more often. Or so they hope.

If this experiment ultimately fails, then rugby league's best players might leave for the more affluent rugby union (though only one indigenous rugby league player has ever crossed codes so far; the others all started in union, came to league and then went back). Some of the biggest clubs may even go to the 15-a-side game.

But they will always play rugby league in the likes of the mining villages of Featherstone and Sharlseton, on the ship-building river banks of Hull and in Wigan, were once cotton was weaved. But the rest of the world will have missed out on the brutal, beautiful game, and those who love it will still be wondering why.