Even the most dyed-in-the- wool Rugby Union fan would have to accept that Saturday’s Tri-Nations Rugby League final between Australia and New Zealand was world-class – both in terms of entertainment and quality. But there again, it would take a miserably bitter league fan to belittle the talents of the mighty All Blacks, still undisputedly the finest Union team on the planet, after their 45-10 demolition job on revitalised Wales at the Millennium Stadium.

But which code is better in these days of unashamed professionalism? And why can they not come together and blend into one worldwide game now that all the historic class rancour has been killed off?

The tragedy is that while Union now has the financial clout to buy up just about any league star they fancy, many of rugby’s top players never actually come into contact with each other. For example the world’s long-time League kingpins – the formidable Australian Kangaroos – never get to face the New Zealand All Blacks. Now what a confrontation that would be…if only they could find a compromise rules formula.

So why can’t they get it together and give us all a treat? Perhaps it’s all rooted in the bitterness that caused the game to split in two back in 1895. For those of you unfamiliar with the history of the oval-ball game, that’s when England’s northern-based clubs split from the Rugby Football Union at a historic meeting at a Huddersfield hotel. The bugbear was ‘broken-time’ payments - wages for working-class players who, unlike their ‘gentleman’ counterparts in the south had to take time off work to play at top level.

With the game effectively split into amateur and professional codes by the class war, an air of bitterness continued for generations - on the terraces as well as among the hierarchy and players of the respective codes. In the north, Union became tarred with an ‘it’s only for upper-class snobs’ brush, while the southern attitude to League was that it was just a game for ‘northern t***ers’.

The reality was very different. For instance, in south Wales, where I was brought up, union was – and still is – the game of the masses, played by everyone from unemployed miners to brain surgeons. Our best players, like the legendary David Watkins and, later, Wales heroes Terry Holmes and Jonathan Davies, were ‘poached’ by League clubs with the lure of oodles of money. But Union’s claims of amateurism were a hypocritical scam anyway – because under-the-counter payments were rife among top players in the form of ‘boot money’, even if the sums involved weren’t quite as lucrative as the wages paid to the pros.

After the 1895 split, the two codes developed a number of important rule changes, with League reducing the number of players in a team from 15 to 13. The rule-makers dispensed with flank forwards, competitive scrummaging and lineouts - and introduced ‘play-the-balls’ to improve the continuity of play. And that essentially is all that divides the codes today, now that past differences and fitness levels have been put onto a level field in the fully professional era.

In terms of overall interest today, there’s no question that Union has the upper hand. Apart from the English-speaking world (with the predictable exception of the United States), it has spread with a vengeance to countries like France, Italy, Argentina, Romania and Japan – and indeed virtually every country in the world has a league structure of some kind. There will be nothing artificial about next year’s 20-nation World Cup finals tournament featuring the likes of New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, the four home nations and France, the hosts. While the last four will inevitably come from this group, nations like Argentina, Italy, Fiji, Samoa, Romania, Canada and Japan are all capable of providing testing opposition. And no fewer than 90 countries were involved at the start of the qualifying tournament in 2004.

League, on the other hand, has become condensed into an international triumvirate, with Great Britain (or rather the cream of the Yorkshire and Lancashire Superleague), Australia and New Zealand out on their own on a world level – and France their only serious challengers. The last Rugby League World Cup in 2002 was something of a joke, resembling an oval-ball equivalent of American baseball’s World Series. With only four nations in with the remotest chance of winning, officials ‘invented’ a string of non-existent teams to create an artificial 16-team tournament. Step up the unlikely lads of Russia and the Cook Islands, who competed against Yorkshire and Lancashire-born players with tenuous family roots representing countries like Scotland and Ireland – where they only play Union.

Having said that, England’s 16-club Superleague is a fiercely-competitive competition which can attract huge crowds to northern grounds. Its attractiveness to the nation as a whole, however, is somewhat tenuous – particularly in the Midlands and south of England whose only representation comes in the form of the London Broncos. League aficionados could argue, on the other hand, that Rugby Union’s Guinness Premiership is primarily made up of Midlands and Southern clubs.

The comparisons are of course unfair, because Australia can point to a League club set-up that is second to none. And the Union authorities in South Africa and New Zealand can boast arguably the most competitive league set-ups in the world.

Those facts in no way detract from the merits of either code as a spectacle – or as an expression of true rugby skills. The biggest plus of recent years is probably that the games look so similar in open play. It is only when the action is halted for a competitive scrum or a lineout that you realise you are watching Union. Fitness levels have also equalled out; the days have long gone when Union's part-time players were way short of their League counterparts when it came to stamina.

What better argument, then, than to amalgamate Superleague and the Guinness Premiership into one brilliant, bruising compromise-rules tournament. All that’s needed is a new code of rules. Any ideas?