Jason Saab does not have to think about the World Cup question for very long. The Cronulla flyer has spent his career fielding the standard binary — Australia or Lebanon? Is the green-and-gold cap still on the table? — and on Josh Mansour's UNSCRIPTED podcast this week he made his position about as plain as it gets.
"I made it pretty public that I pledge my allegiance to Lebanon to represent them in the World Cup," Saab said. "It's still like, what, November? It's a while away. So checks knows that. Everyone kind of knows that. So we'll just wait till we get to the end of the year and then go from there."
Saab, 25, has played eight or nine games for the Cedars already, scoring nine tries he reckons, and was eligible for selection at the previous World Cup before injury intervened. The eligibility process that time included sending grandparents' passports up the chain — and he is willing to take the next step if it is asked of him.
"If the next step was for you to actually apply for Lebanese citizenship, would you actually do that? Yeah, absolutely," Saab told Mansour, before turning to the more familiar 'eye test' question that always follows for him. "Look at me — it's not really, you know, on the eye test, [it's] like, 'this guy's not'. But anyone can have to explain it."
Saab's pitch for representing Lebanon is, in his own framing, both heritage and identity. He grew up in a Western Sydney Maronite family with the parish at the centre of family life, his parents and his sister married in the same church by the same priest. The pull is uncomplicated.
But for all the seriousness of the World Cup talk, the segment that has travelled furthest from the episode is the lighter one. Mansour pressed Saab on whether he really would back himself against viral American sprinter and content creator iShowSpeed in a foot race. The thumbnail answers that question on his behalf — but in the actual conversation, Saab was just as ready to pivot to a real grievance about a race that never got off the ground at all.
Last year, Saab confirmed, the NRL flirted with the idea of running a 'fastest player' sprint at grand-final time. He was approached by both his manager and someone from the league. Then it disappeared.
"It's a pretty terrible concept to be honest," Saab said. "Not everyone's available for starters to do it. Did Xavier Coates play in the grand final last year? No. The Broncos beat Melbourne. So Coates is, like, playing on the game day. If you don't have the fastest people there, then what's the point — only one person?"
His preferred version of the event — and one he reckons would have actually drawn a crowd — was a standalone meet rather than a halftime novelty act.
"You could just do a so much better event than a halftime thing," he said. "If you did that at, like, [Sydney Cricket Ground], for example, made it a full event, they could pull a nice crowd together. They'd make heaps of money out of it as a separate event as well. Everyone that's going to the grand final is already going to the grand final. But you can get a lot of people that aren't going to the grand final to go to this event also on another day."
The issue of cash — almost inevitably with a sprint race full of NRL pay packets — was where Saab thought it might also have stalled.
"Plus the boys want cash as well," he said. "If they did offer, surely they would have offered, but I feel like [it] wouldn't be enough."
The rest of the long episode wandered through the usual UNSCRIPTED territory — Saab's commute from Western Sydney to Cronulla, his year at Manly, where he reckons he was just a kid trying to do too much, and the personality-vs-numbers debate around being the fastest man in the competition. He has played the bulk of the season at his customary cruising tempo and hit 25 with seven seasons in the bag and his 150-game milestone in sight.
The Lebanon decision, though, is the one Mick Cheika and the Cedars' selection panel were always going to be most interested in. As of this week, Saab has put it in writing publicly: when November rolls around, he is in a green and red shirt, not a green and gold one, and he is not coming off it.
