As someone who has covered every Tri and Four Nations since the first in 1999, your correspondent feels a higher level of expectation than any previous series.

England are coached by Wayne Bennett and boast their best forward pack in a generation. Australia are back to full strength and also have a new coach. Top seeds New Zealand are on the ropes, ducking and weaving. Scotland are chock full of yarns about kilts.

But the Four Nations are not the future of international rugby league. The fourth team has never won a game – Samoa came closest in 2014 – and the concept is seen as doing little for the revolving door of minnows.

"The challenge for the Four Nations is: does that do enough good to enough nations?" said RLIF chairman Nigel Wood at the start of last year.

Instead, we will have a return to tours, a new competition called the Federation Cup (or Confederation Cup, or something like that) and a Nines circuit. Maybe, between the next two World Cups, there will be room for another Four Nations. Possibly not.

What would be the best outcome for the game from the maybe-last Four Nations? Undoubtedly, an England win.

Despite a well-run and good-humoured media conference to launch the tournament at Anfield, the venue for the final, on Monday the event was completely ignored by most of the UK national media.

Your correspondent has been coming to Britain for rugby league, sometimes multiple times a year, since 1990. The sport here is more 'niche' than it has ever been in that time.

Maybe in the days of Eddie Waring, rugby league was marginally mainstream here but that has never been the case in my time. In 1995 I called random numbers in the cities hosting World Cup games and outside the heartlands the only people who knew the tournament was on had Aussie flatmates.

But on Mal Meninga's final Kangaroos Tour, which I covered the year before, the venues for the Tests were grand soccer stadia Wembley, Old Trafford and Elland Road. The sport here cannot, and does not, consistently use these stages for internationals anymore.

Perhaps if Great Britain had won the 1994 series, or England the '95 World Cup, history would have changed and rugby league would be a much bigger sport in the UK. Other national teams weren't going so well at the time, the success of the London Olympics would have seemed fanciful then.

Sam Burgess's celebrity, earned by a controversial stint in rugby union, is being used to market the Four Nations to the wider populace outside the M62 corridor. He can tire of being asked about it but he's nonetheless being wheeled out to do so.

Rugby league only gets noticed here when there are internationals, which is why the reluctance of Australia to play – including telling GB to stay home last year – is so deeply frustrating to the denizens of Red Hall, the Rugby Football League's Leeds base.

An England win in a tournament involving Australia for the first time in more than four decades might be two decades late but it will raise awareness and interest in a country of 53 million.

By comparison, will a single extra person take an interest in rugby league if – as appears likely – Australia takes out the tournament?

I'd argue that people who follow the Wallabies and the Socceroos, at least partially, do so out of respect for the opposition. They rate victories as a significant achievement. The market has got more discerning since the packed stadia of the 20th century for league Tests in Australia and the way to win back Australian support for international rugby league is to make the opposition stronger.

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