Sounds about right.

1 good game against wasps at home and 1 try in 400 minutes = 'killing it'






Sams wages = '£1 million a season'







Good old sc-avenger, always good for a laugh

Well, we'll see won't we?

My bet is that he's in the 6Ns squad at some point and will play in the England World Cup team. A Rugby League player can come in and command a place in the elite team with just a handfull of games under his belt its very embarrassing for Rugby Onion

If you say so

I do



I do

Seeing as the RU will be paying a huge chunk of his wage, he'd have to lose a leg not to be fast-tracked into the England set-up. They want some return on their investment. What he does before then will be of little consequence.

He'll probably get a run out against the likes of Italy in the 6 nations but against the likes of Ireland and Wales....probably not. Likewise the WC, in England's group it's hard to see him getting a shot against the Aussies or Welsh but have him play against Uruguay when the win is pretty much guaranteed is likely.

He could well play against the "whipping boys" of the 6N and WC.....but will he play against the contenders in those competitions remains to be seen,

Correct.
Money Bill played a total of 7 minutes in the RWC semi and Final combined....he played full games against the groups whipping boys, but when it was down to the key games, he came on at the end as Union coaches seem to empty their benches at the end of games now.
As the Butcher says, the RFU are paying a fair chunk of his salary......something we could look at in League if we took the international game more seriously

That a RL superstar has had to leave Sydney where he was a household name and head to the west of England to earn a decent living isn't exactly filling the good news column for Rugby League either

Blimey!

I agree with Gutterfax. I feel a bit dirty...

I am now a supporter of a "proper" RL club in the Championship, so will be expected to talk sense and pour scorn upon the flash harry's of the not so super league

Difference is though, lack of proper teams in Interntional RL. England in RU have a genuine fight on their hands to escape their group in the WC with Australia and Wales there......in RL you know that Aus, NZ and England will make up the semis with one other.

It's like the six nations. In RU you'd have 4 teams who could seriously compete for the title with the odd whipping boy. If we did the 6 nations in RL with the same nations then England would win every game comfortably by 30/40 points and the rest would scrap it out for 2nd place.

Agree and I think the best solution for this is to get RL into more schools as a first step...you can't create a RL culture, but you can breed one. Get schoolboy internationals on the calendar...a regular tri or quad nations with england, wales France and maybe scotland. Same in the pacific isles......get these kids (u16's & U18's) used to competing against each other.
I am very vocal in my opposition to heritage teams posing as international sides, but until we start with the youth, they are I suppose all we really have.
When these kids leave school, get them signed up to clubs/academies with the best 25 having 30% of their salaries met by the RFL/NRL.......within 10 years you'll have a more competitive Wales and Scotland....Fiji or Samoa with players from those countries.

That's the key thing though....."10 years"....not enough patience I think from most. The Crusaders a good example, hoping that if we fast track them into SL we'll have a competitive Welsh team a few years later. The biggest problem RL has in terms of growing new teams outside the traditional areas is not allowing them to grow organically, but instead trying to fast track them before their ready. Realistically the soonest we could expect a competive Wales/Ireland/Scotland IF done right is at least 10 years but probably more.....but patience won't allow that.

The best that we can hope for in the near future is to include Wales or Scotland in he next 4N but, as things stand, this creates a very easy game for the other teams involved.
However, if we persist with the idea and keep playing the current "second tier" international matches, they may become competitive.
Of course there would need to be some creative thinking about certain players nationalities but, this seems to become less and less important as time goes by.

London was starting to pay dividends after about 10 years.....IF we'd been run properly from 2007 onwards I suspect we would have seen a 17 Man cockney Squad in SL by 2017 and at least a half dozen England players.
The patience issue is directly linked to the clubs AND THE TV PARTNERS having too much say in the overall running of the game. The idea of the NRL flipping to 4 quarters to accommodate TV and get more cash is a prime example of the dog wagging the tail.....

it seems that there is only a certain amount of money to go around and due to the nature of the sport European governments aren't keen on Rugby League; as you probably know Tony Abbott has given almost A$10M of tax payers money to Souths recently, the opposite happened up here, its been 'decided' what sports are big in certain areas, this will change slowly over time, but not during our life time Fax butty. I could give you a critique of rugby union and soccer but you've asked me not too in the past so I won't, and obviously Rugby League isn't perfect on the field either, but with all things considered, imo it's the best sport going around.

So all this talk of your criticising the RFL L.Broncos etc. is almost a load of BS, John O'Neill said in 2003 to the IRB, 'look we've got enough money now (probably with a fair amount of borrowing on top) to buy out the NRL', the IRB said no, but it wouldn't have mattered if the IRB had said yes, rugby uion would still be struggling in Aus today, as that's he way it is. Most ppl are sheep, and of course the saying "When in Rome..." is a big important statement in Europe, so if you move to Wales you follow rugby union, it's just the way it is.

Sam Burgess got on the field for the last 15 minutes of his latest Union match today.

Didn't get the ball once and didn't have to make a single tackle!

No further comment!

Its probably because Glasgow had most of the ball trying to win the game :crazy: you said you'd cancelled your BT subscription because you were 'sick' of watching RU, but you obviously didn't. The lady doth protest too much methinks.

Damn easy money, then.

And for that reason I doubt we'll see him come back to the fold, sadly.

December 14th


January 25th



Hmmm.....Supposed cancellation period ended nearly 2 weeks ago and even then, you said you'd stop watching it regardless. I'd seek professional help if I were you........

Easy money and easier on his body which is a large part of his reasoning for taking a couple of years away from the NRL.

Money plays its part but Sams got a huge earning potential in the NRL, the opportunity to become a duel international and compete in the World Cup also played its part in his decision.


Sam understood that the way he plays Rugby League would mean his top flight career would be over by the time he was 30 at which point he'd have to give League away and neither would he be fit enough to do anything significant in Union.

By playing Union now, he rests his body to a large degree, achieves what he wants to in Union and still gets to go back to Souths at an age where he can maintain his reputation as one of the Worlds best. Most importantly the reduction in wear and tear on his body extends his career as a professional sportman by a couple if years.

I didn't see the game but in the report I read, it said he stopped someone scoring a try with a goal line tackle, so although I believe you when you say he isn't involved much but I suspect you are exaggerating to make the point.

I honestly didn't see him have to make a tackle.

What I did think at the time (given that Union play him as a centre) was that he was very near those pile-ups that occur in Union when there is a tackle / voluntary tackle. But I didn't see him actually need to stop anybody.

Accept I could be wrong as I wasn't there and am therefore at the mercy of the angles and action chosen by the TV director. I wiz through a recording of the match to try to miss out those long periods when the TV director is showing replays when there is nothing actually happening on the pitch (and that happens a lot of the time) & I wiz through the match up to the point that Sam comes on.

As an aside, interesting to hear the Union commentators saying they hadn't seen a scrum that hadn't either had to be 're-set' or ended up with a penalty, that the scrum was "an important part of the game" but also it is "a blot on the game" and "something has to be done about it". Get shut of those "wing forwards" for a start I'd suggest and play 13 a side.
Aside 2. I had to laugh when a guy got sin-binned for tackling an opponent who had the ball! I kid you not. To be fair and to clarify, the guy with the ball was surrounded by his own players in the middle of a "maul" and, apparently, you are not allowed to tackle the ball carrier in those circumstances [i[Insert your own smilies as appropriate![/i

I agree about the scrum. To say the RU pride themselves on that part of the game, and it should be so, the professional level scrums are horrible at the moment. They've messed about with them so much they can't get a clean heel any more.
Any RU follower bemoaning the RL scrum isn't watching any club union now