Halliwell Jones holds 11k hardly a huge crowd on which to build a stable international game - Leeds Rhinos haven't had a crowd that small for years.

Are all the games against NZ sold out? so what makes you think a SSI country will be as big a draw as NZ?- crowds for a series of that nature would be pitiful - how many turned up at LSV on Saturday even at £10 a ticket - the international game is not where RL has strength. It is very likely the WCC game Leeds v North Queensland would draw a bigger crowd than any of the 3 internationals if it were played at Elland Rd.

The exiles would produce a better series than either France or Wales - I think the would actually beat England.

Halliwell Jones holds 15k

This discussion ignores the nature of the two games. RL is generally far more unforgiving on the scoreboard when a 'better' team plays a 'weaker' one. There is no place to hide. You cannot aim for scrums, lineouts and penalties and starve the opposition of possession. You score a penalty, you give the ball back for 6 tackles. Against Australia just one set is quite possible to lead to a try against minnows even when starting from their own line.

If the sport wants to become genuinely more competitive across a bigger range of countries we'd have to look at bringing back genuine contests for possession - stripping the ball, allowing tacklers to strike at the PTB, not to mention proper scrums.

This simply won't happen because this isn't what RL is nowadays - contests for possession have been removed to make the game faster and cleaner. Which is fine when teams are relatively evenly matched but a fatal flaw when they're not.

Agree with that. I think for a thriving future of the sport we have to go back and reintroduce some of the elements we got rid, even if only in a very mild fashion.

I'd have proper scrums. I totally understand people being against this but I don't think it'd turn into Union style scrums (which have been hugely cleaned up in the last year or so) and I think they'd genuinely give "lesser" teams another chance at competing. Get some tackle-hungry backrowers and a couple of big props and a good kicking half back and suddenly a team has a way of making a better opposition have to work. Because the lesser team can kick downfield and then potentially win the scrum.

Smokey had some decent suggestions on a previous thread of possibly changing the 40-20 to a 30-30 or changing the game to 4 quarters instead of 2 halves.

I'm not advocating going back to rucks, mauls and lineouts but just a few ways to help teams compete.

Television coverage for the european championship would be a good start. Lot's of emerging amateur nations taken up the game in recent years e.g sweden, norway

I don't think I could stand the 'Feeding' thread after every round, repeated VR of the SH putting the ball in the scrum, Stevo ranting on endlessly, another reason for the Pies to scream persecution. Stats showing how they had lost 56.8% of scrums with Bentham in charge. No thanks.

Those of us who remember vividly the days of the specialist hooker whose job it was to trundle from scrum to scrum winning possession, usually by sticking their legs outside those of the open side prop and flailing wildly at the ball so it came back out of the tunnel three or four times before the game got under way again, say no thanks to the return of "contested" scrums.

Why "go back" to something? Why not "move forward" to a contested scrum unlike we've seen before.

oh ffs. Nothing, lots of wealthy ppl have bn playing RU for yrs in Argentina. They've got a lot of good players who get transferred abroad to play professionally, same with Georgia, although Georgia are still behind Argentina obviously in terms of development.

We're in competition with soccer for fans, they're the fans we should be targeting, as G Hetherington has said, we can forget about getting people with good degrees to follow our sport, it's not gonna happen, possibly ever. I've always bn in favour of negative marketing, we should be putting soccer down, I think soccer is a stupid game and we should be telling people that.

RU have contested scrums - how often does it resort in a different result to RL scrums? The contested part of RU revolves around who can get penalty at the scrum rather than setting up for a sparkling threequarter play. Is that what we want in our game?

I would continue with the scrums as we have but the 12 players in the scrum cannot get involved in play 1 i.e. 7 against 7 for one play.

The NZ games haven't been played yet so we can't say whether or not they will be sold out. I expect there will be 3 well attended games.

8000 and something was reasonable against France considering the team they put out.

I gave two examples of popular games in this country involving SP Island teams. Can you give examples that did have "pitiful" attendances.

Yes the international game is not RL's strength, but it has the biggest potential growth and it is achievable.

Agreed.One of the most tedious sites in Union is watching scrum..collapse..scrum..collapse..scrum..collapse..penalty! why? who knows? crack on after 5 minutes of boredom.No thanks.

I agree, though I blame Sky for that. They don't do it with their Union coverage yet strangely do for their League coverage.

Yep. There's absolutely no reason to have scrums "like they used to be". Firstly the players are fitter and professional now so I'm sure someone in the team could master a bit of hooking and another job in the team. And there's no reason for the front row to be fat knackers. They'd just be slightly stronger and slightly less mobile than currently.
Or not. It can be the clubs choice as to what tactical route they go down.
There have been big packs and mobile packs in RL even during contested scrums. There's no reason why suddenly all clubs would go with big fat sods as props. In fact they couldn't because they'd get run around in the rest of play. But it gives a club an option they don't currently have.

There's also no reason why contested scrums in League would be the same as contested scrums in Union. They're different situations with different priorities, different types of player and with different rules. They weren't anything like the same when RL had contested scrums so there's no reason to assume they would be if we had them again.

IIRC the one thing that kept the scorelines against Australia in 1982 to the levels they were was GB winning the scrums.

I'm not advocating a return to contested scrums, but there are lots of areas where attacking sides get too much advantage - short kicks into the in-goal leading to repeat sets, inability to strip the ball in the tackle, no striking at the PTB, allowing players to walk miles off the mark to PTB, defensive lines sometimes being set over 10m back, not touching the ball with the foot at the PTB etc etc. You can add to that Australia's insistence on NRL interpretations (and refs if possible) whenever Australia play, which is letting lunatics run the asylum IMO.

Well, quite, and enforcing current laws would do a lot more good than introducing new ones.

Yep agree with all that.
I'm not saying contested scrums are the only solution just that I think we need some form of allowing teams to compete in another area than currently.

And the stuff with the reffing is getting ridiculous. The bizarre and, frankly, bent VR decision in last years 4 Nations along with plenty of other on-field decisions is just the latest in a long line of refs bending over and taking one for the teams from down under. There were plenty of dodgy calls that benefitted the NRL teams in this years World Club Series and we even saw Silverwood whoring himself out to the NZ team in a sodding friendly.

Get rid of scrums, and instead have a tip-off as they have in basketball.

Great, sounds like a line-out.

IIRC that series was the first one with sin bins available, and both hookers went for five minutes for repeated early strikes in the first Test? Max Krilich hooked for Australia, think GB started with David Ward, ended with John Dalgreen in the third Test? Can't remember who played in the second - David Watkinson?

I disagree with the last statement - once every ground is full for each game and participation numbers grow further then you can focus on 3-4 games at the end of the season. The club game in the UK has a long way to go before it reaches anything close to its potential.

As for your attendances - there were a number of games involving the SSI countries where attendances were less than 10K during the last WC.

Was it Noble? He captained the 84 tour down under.

Good call. Just looked it up, it was Dalgreen in the second Test, and Noble in the third.

Great Britain used over 30 players in the three-match series.

It's simple - a regular, annual tournament whereby the European nations play off against one another. If you want to see how that'd work, google 'Six Nations'.

As has been said repeatedly, people who are not already RL fans *do not care, and do not understand why they should care* about Warrington v Widnes. It's two teams from places they've never been to and likely never heard of playing a game they've rarely watched. It's really easy to say 'we should fix the club game', much harder to make it happ. And while we sit around in the hope that a sensible reorganisation of the club game miht happen, we are getting outcompeted in our biggest growth area (Internationals).

There needs to be:

-Yearly 5N tournament in high summer (England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and France)
-End of season 3-Test tours (v New Zealand, Australia or a combined 'Pacific Islands' side)
-Fixed international eligibility rules so you can't leave Samoa or Tonga for NZ or Aus, or the home nations for England.
-Early season match against The Exiles (although RFL should actively approach the Barbarians to take over this match and get the Baa-Baas brand into RL)
-Yorkshire v Lancashire series.

This wouldn't be a success overnight, it'd require a hell of a lot more games to be played away from the Heartlands, but it'd provide a regular series of games that would have a big enough crowd and media draw to warrant greater attention, sponsorship etc.

It would also disadvantage bigger clubs more likely to suffer from International / Rep call ups, but given we want as competitive a SL as possible I don't think it's a bad thing if Leeds were to occasionally lose at Belle Vue as had 6 players away with England.

Yes, fully agree. The biggest stumbling blocks are

a) our inept administrators, and

b) the fact that they'd get very little help/support from the insular Aussies.