Why has it taken since 1982 for the penny to drop?

Does anyone REALLY think the clubs will not take the easy option of purchasing"talent" rather then the hard work of developing talent and thats not just players but ALL aspects of the game.

The Aussies/Kwis/South Sea Islanders/PNG etc etc are just human beings no more no less.

I am sorry if I keep repeating myself but until the ENTIRE game in this country, at all levels, is revamped and the club only mentality removed then there will be little if any improvement

What changes would you suggest?

So would you prefer to go back 4 or 5 years, to the ‘halcyon days’ of the ‘big four’?

Basically all you want to do is let the wealthy clubs ‘poach’ the cream of the other clubs & carry on the cartel. How can the ‘smaller’ clubs possibly compete if the cash rich clubs are allowed to take this stance?

The quality of RL may have dropped a little, but many games are too close to call, is that a bad thing? Maybe next time you watch Leeds play Salford a little voice in your head might say ‘’I think we’ll just sneak it’’ Not the usual ‘’Two easy points’’

Instead of having a rethink regarding the SC, why not have it regarding picking the England squad. Why not have a cap on the number of players from each club, because the tried & tested method of picking the ‘big’ clubs players has failed miserably.

Jesus, we're bad enough as it is, the last thing we should be doing is making it harder for ourselves.

Why?

What have all the so called 'stars' achieved? Look at the last world cup, dire, along with the past 30 years. Time to try something different.

that was in effect 6. or half the league. half the league being in with a decent chance sounds pretty healthy to me!
by becoming better run,maybe?

also when was the last team to win anything with a squad of players 'poached'[for poached read bought or signed in fair competition from others rather than a homegrown spine supplemented by some quality elsewhere?

probably not, shocks have always happened

because it would be idiotic! why on earth would we leave out the best man for that position just to meet a pointless self imposed quota?

why not pick a whole 17 of props too, that would be different too

What absolute nonsense.

Whatever your thoughts are about how bad Bradford were, to claim Wire played 'absolutely shocking standard of Rugby' is just plain dumb.

Very good discipline, good offensive play, few mistakes, some creative tries, okay, some room for improvement in defence, but that often happens in games where you are 30 points up.

How any team, no matter who they are playing, can score 58 away from home, yet still be classed as shocking is beyond me.

This is the point. We need more competitive games as that is the only way our players will improve. Having our top players play in a handful of competitive games each season (for decades) is what has seen us fall so far behind the Aussies. Now we are starting to address this.

....agree totally. As an example, players at the best teams rarely take the risky option because they know another chance will be along in a minute. This results in very athletic players but...wingers who rarely take a man on the outside, centres without passing skills and half-backs who pass or run but struggle to mix it up. Highly competitive games increases the speed of decision making and changes the balance of risk attached to each decision.
How many times in internationals have our players looked short of ideas...directly as result of wrongly assessing the options and at too slow a speed.

Typical.

Most England players are chosen on what club their at, everyone knows this, it's time for Tony Smith to look elsewhere as these 'stars' are getting found out over and over again, and are not as good as everyone makes out, it's alright when theyre playing in a team of good players, as soon as they play internationals they are exposed.

It's not working, everyone knows it, for example would Keith Senior play for England if he played for a club such as Wakey or Quins. I think not.

Cheers Smokey for your retort, however, you follow a club which has had great success over a number of years, and especially of late. I on the other hand follow a club which has struggled on, but appears to finally be getting its act together. We are poles apart in our views, and that’s life.

But with regard to the Salary Cap, I still don’t understand how increasing or removing it will affect the quality of Super League games or our International chances.

Also, the issue of selecting players from the top clubs, it’s like re-revisiting a failed theory. These players may stand out in a club team brimming with talent, but when they put on an England shirt it’s just a cash bonus, an added sweetener for playing for a top club. The majority of the squad who holidayed in Aus. should be binned off, how many chances do they deserve?

On the flip side to let a side as poor as Bradford were (and make no mistake that's the worst performance I've seen from a Bradford Bulls side) score 22 points shows that the wire performance wasn't THAT good, I admit they looked good in attack at some points but the Bradford defense was absolutely pathetic, but having said all that you can only play whats in front of you and Warrington did everything they needed to do.

as Martin Offiah said on Sky Sports News, Bradford are not as bad as that performance suggests and Warrington are not as good.

This comes back to the issue of competitiveness. We should be selecting the stand out players from a host of top teams.
As it is we are selecting the average players from a couple of top teams. Our alternative is to select the stand out players from average teams. Arguing over which of these we should do is pointless as neither approach is going to be successful.

The quality of English top-flight club football has never been higher. The lack of a salary cap has allowed teams to put together star-studded teams that are dominating the European game and playing sparkling stuff.

It hasn't helped the International prospects of England much though and 16 teams are there just to make up the numbers and try to avoid relegation, with the top 4 essentially a closed shop. No English manager has ever won the Premier League.

We need a balance between quality and competition - part of the appeal of sport is uncertainty. There is no simple solution, no magic wand we can wave to make everything perfect, whether it be coaching badges, scrapping the cap or whatever. I find RL exciting and entertaining, the quality is high enough for me, and the competition is better for it being spread thinly, rather than more concentrated at the current top clubs. The fall of some clubs means others rise and Huddersfield, Wakefield, Cas, and Rovers have improved - whether by as much as Wigan, Hull and Bradford have deteriorated is debatable and there is no objective way of measuring it. My guess is standards are probably rising, relative to our own past, rather than Australia, admittedly. We tend to remember the best of the past. People always seem to say standards are falling, which would mean quality was at its highest in the late 1800s. What is the peak we are allegedly falling away from? I'm sure there were threads or articles or conversations, bemoaning the state of the game then, too.

You simply cannot compare the two sports, Soccer and RL and so far apart in terms of, well everything TBH (apart from the actual product where RL wins hands down). It' pointless looking at what the FA do and comparing it with the job the RFL do.

The scale is massively different, but some of the principles are common to both. Speculation about overseas quotas and some sort of salary cap in football pops up fairly regularly in the press now. My point was just that creating high-quality sports product, which sounds like an unequivically good thing, might not give you an enthralling sports competition.

Maybe the NRL is a better comparison and aspiration - but the RFL has already adopted many of the same policies.

Once all clubs can spend the cap i'd look at raising it, until then i genuinely believe in the product we have

If you hire crap British coaches and don't invest in youth you will get what you deserve in SL.

I can't say it any plainer than that.

Got to agree with that, it' no coincidence that Leeds have had their best few years for a long long time because they invested in the youth system and stuck with it, didn't throw silly money at over the hill Australians, had a sensible wage structure and kept the main nucleus of the side together all of them who had grown up playing Rugby League together.

I couldn't care less who is challenging at the top as long as my team is one of them. But looking at recent years, Bradford and Wigan have really gone backwards and they havent been replaced by any of the other clubs who despite getting better, aren't anywhere up to that standard. My club Hull seemed to be getting there towards the top but have never been able to take that next step and have also gone backwards. The likes of Huddersfield, Rovers, Cas, Wakey etc might be better than in the past but we now have only 2 teams capable of seriously challenging for title instead of the 4 or 5 in the past. This isn;t down to the salary cap as I Bradford and Wigan have still been able to spend up to the limit and bring in top players if they wanted to. But the way they have been run has been very poor. For SL to be truely exciting we need to go back to having 4 or 5 teams capable of winning the league (as I say, I dont care who the others are as long as Hull are one of them

) and the standard of the other 19-10 been higher. I don't think the RFL can do anything about this tbh

Clubs might be going backwards, but at least they're not going bump, which would be a lot worse for the game.

Indeed. It should now be a case of breaking eggs to make omlettes.