Souths were on a different planet last night. We could have put out a SL dream team style selection against them and they'd have been mullered too.

Really? Remind me again where St George finished in the NRL and you lost to them at home

The reality is, the gulf in class is getting bigger and bigger

Regards

King James

We need more money coming into the game but not so we can pay the players more.

We need to get every club to work to high professional standards in their coaching , nutrition, youth structures and player welfare. We need clubs to invest in their local junior sides and put a lot of resources into the grass roots of RL. The high level of professional coaching and treatment the 1st team squads get should be replicated for all playing levels within the club. Once this is in place and the we start seeing some reward in the standard of players, then we can look at raising the cap.

However, all this costs money and there just isn't enough coming into the sport.

Souths played well in the conditions yesterday.
They are a good team.
It should be remembered that they did not come first in the NRL, they came third behind the Roosters and Manly.
They won as many regular season games as Penrith and it was an unusual finals series where neither the first or second placed team made the Grand Final.
It was third (Souths) v seventh (the Dogs) that has a lot to do with the Grand Final result, The Bulldogs had shot their load by the time they got to the Grand Final.

They are not the perfect unbeatable team by any means and are no guarantee this season to repeat last years great finish.

We need to double the number of people/kids playing the sport, which would give us more opportunities to find/develop bigger,stronger,faster and cleverer players than we currently have.Simple as that for me

None of which means squat, if the players aren't prepared to work hard to improve and refine their games continually.

How many promising juniors do we see hit regular first team rugby and then just never progress any further? There has to be reason for why so many plateau so easily, and a large part of it has to lie with how much the player wants to test themselves, refine their skills, learn new ones rather than just hit the comfort zone of the first team and settle back into a decent living.

You can throw all the quality coaching, facilities and nutrition you like at a player. If they're not prepared to listen because they're too happy going out with their mates rather than working on their game, then it won't make a blind bit of difference.

From the time they first come into contact with a professional club, a player's abilities should be continually improving not stalling or in some cases seemingly declining.

If you want a case in point, take a look at Ryan Atkins. How can a player build a career at one of the biggest clubs in the competition as a centre, and still not have the ability to draw a man and deliver a timed pass? Why hasn't that area of his game improved? I'm pretty sure the coaches he's had down the years will have tried to get him to work on it, but how much does Ryan himself need to? He's still getting picked. He's still getting paid. If he was an antipodean, he would have been bombed out of most NRL clubs by now for having such a massively important gap in his skill set.

I'm surprised no-one else had thought of it.

The gulf in class between NRL First and last is minimal.
The gulf in class between our top teams and the NRL is minimal
We could field 4 teams tomorrow and compete, give us the extra cap money, use it to pad out the squads and you're honestly telling me we can't compete?

Wakefield and Salford would get creamed though, week in week out.

Wigan/Wire/Saints/Leeds could easily make a fist of it.

The evidence of the WCC in recent years suggests we can compete, but only when the deck is stacked in our favour in terms of venue and timing.

If you sent Saints out to play that game again at the SFS in June, the result would IMO be similar if not worse. While the top SL clubs might pick up a few wins in a season, I can't see any of them coming close to winning an NRL GF. They're just not used to the week-in, week-out intensity that the NRL demands.

Maybe the solution is to put together a team of elite England players to play as a club side in the NRL? If only someone could blog about such a concept...

The point about intensity is the key thing. Last week Saints had what should have been one of the tougher games of the season, away at one of the few times spending the full salary cap.

We made probably 10-15 unforced errors and still won by 50 points. A decent team would have punished Saints for those mistakes. We need to get our own league in order before we can hope to send teams to compete on a regular basis against the NRL.

Hopefully the #RLnewera will see the top teams having a more intense run of 7-8 games from August onwards, when the pressure is on to get in the play offs.

I'm not sure there's much of a solution. Bottom line here is that top athletes aren't sport-specific. The guys who are good at one sport tend to be good at all sports : right speed, strength, physique etc. In Oz, those top athletes gravitate towards many sports, but Rugby League is possibly the number one draw because of its profile and earnings power. Ditto RU in New Zealand. In this country, soccer sucks up nearly all our athletes. Nothing else comes close.

That's why the salary cap is a bit of a red herring - Union has far bigger pay packets than league in the UK, but the quality of player is no different - because they too are drawing on a much smaller pool of top athletes.

Essentially, there are better RL players currently knocking about the lower pro and semi-pro football leagues than there are in our top clubs' academies (Ryan Giggs a good example of this). Same goes for our Olympic squad, RU side and so on.

The question is: how do we get them to play RL instead of soccer? The only two ways are to either get them very young in a professional, well-run setup so that they love the game and dont really think about the round ball (very very hard given the media profile - which is why we only get top athletes from a tiny catchment in our most hardcore RL towns) or find a way of targeting those lads who just miss out on progression to pro soccer and convince them there's an alternative way of making a living from sport. But that involves getting a teenager to abandon his dreams of multi-millions, WAGS and superstardom.

I'm not sure there's a solution. Soccer is eating all men's sport in this country.

The type of physical shape we need is not suited to soccer, we need athletes with real strength and power, soccer needs guys with aerobic capacity and a lot of skill. If the NRL is the future model we need virtually every player to be 6'3" plus and capable of carrying 16' with the ability to run 20/30 metres very quickly.

The Souths team is not a typical NRL side, every now and then in sport you get something special and that's Souths at the moment.

Whatever the reason, be it Crowe, The fight to be re admitted, Souths history, the Burgess story, Something specials happened at Souths.

There's other sports looking at how Souths prepare their athletes in much the same way that they once (and still do) looked at the NFL. Those athletes are some of the best and most coveted in the NRL and some are coveted by a number of other competitions and sports like no other group of Rugby League players are or ever were.

Sts got blown away, however Souths would have beaten any team of Rugby players on the planet on that form whether they're from SL, the NRL or any side pulled together in Union including the All Blacks!

Of course we're behind the Ausies, while ever we are an after thought of a sport in the UK we will always be behind them, this chase to catch them is unrealistic.
They are for all intents and purposes the National sport of Australia, they get the pick of the best athletes available to them and also have the pulling power to make gifted athletes change their nationality. They have a profile which attracts the type of sponsorship, advertisers and hospitality customers that SL can only dream about.
They have a TV contract that compares with the Premier League (not quite) but it dwarfs that of the SL. That in turn allows them to invest in facilities which are at the cutting edge of athlete preparation, stuff we won't get over here for a decade or so later if ever.

Every now and then we will assemble a team capable of beating their NRL counterparts but not this Souths team, they're too good and are a freakish product of a perfect storm

I see over reactions are not going out of fashion.

The previous record defeat was 0-38. Which I believe was Saints also, when the cap was closer and the likes of Scully, Cunningham, Longy and Wellens were at their best.

This game is like fodder from heaven for some.

In the end it was a one off game. Saints played poorly, South's played well. Canterbury thrashed the Bulldogs 30-6 in the NRL GF. Does that mean the Bulldogs are a terrible team, that if they had played it would have been only a 15 point difference?

In the end a one off game is a one off game. Take the loss and move on.

Teams playing themselves is never a good way forward.

This, this and this again!!!
The OP is very negative and we must look at this weekend from 180° - what can we learn from the experience in order to make our comp stronger? I think it's an ace concept - hopefully the RFL/NRL will stick with it for five years at least before binning it or changing the format. Not sure why the first two games needed to go to golden point. So on that basis we drew one and lost two looking better already!!!

What good is it going to do if all we are achieving is providing Union and the NRL with a better standard of player?

Im sure both of those leagues will be licking their lips at us kindly making ourselves a farm system for them.

We say we stack things in our favour, but do we? Yeah its held over here, fair enough that works out for us, but we dont ref to SL interpretations, i've never believed the fitness aspect of it, i dont think the NRL sides will be much if any better in two weeks time, we handicap ourselves with the SC, we seem to have swallowed the aussie propaganda that when they lose its because its unfair and when they win its because of how much better they are.

The answer isnt to take even more better players out of SL, which will damage the quality of SL and make it more difficult for us to bring through better players. The answer is for us to have fewer, better clubs, with more, better players.

If we have decided clubs should rise and fall on their merit they should do so with out the handicapping effects of the salary cap.

Ok but if we raise the SC then none of the money will go towards what really needs to be done and will just allow us to keep one or two players in SL who would have gone to RU or the NRL. If the clubs have the right systems in place then the conveyor belt of talent should increase as more players are benefiting from the improved setup. This in turn would make losing 1 or 2 players to other sports less of an issue.

Raising the SC will only provide a temporary fix. The top 4 or 5 clubs would be way out of reach of the rest of the teams in SL and the CC which means rather than the best players moving to RU or NRL, they'll just move to one of 4 or 5 top SL clubs.

The compromise to this would be the marquee player allowance. That would keep the integrity of the salary cap while allowing us to hold onto some of our best talents.

Except we supposedly did in this World Club Series. So we had benefit of home advantage, match fitness and refereeing interpretations, and our best still got tonked out of the park by the NRL's best. Our other two sides were competitive with two teams from the mid-table of the NRL who will struggle to make their playoffs this year.

We are talking about the elite here.

These are players that are always wanted, they are the commodity in demand and they are the ones that others want. They are also the ones we are losing. Paying them what they are worth isnt just a temporary solution it is the only permanent solution. There isnt going to be a time when the best rugby players in the world arent wanted elsewhere, there isnt ever going to be a time when we are producing so many that we are ok losing the best.

Some in RL seem to believe that if we play it safe long enough, if we keep this austere program of spending as little as possible, if we 'cut our cloth accordingly' we will somehow stumble in to a world where our time has come and RU will fall apart, the NRL will do likewise and we will be left with a clear run. Its not going to happen. What will happen is what is happening. We will be left behind.

The top 5 or 6 would be beyond the others for a reason. In actual terms Wigan are paying out about 50% of the wages they were when the cap was introduced, in real terms accounting for inflation its a fraction of that.

16 years of no rises and real term falls hasnt seen the others catch up either on or off the pitch. At what stage do we accept the SC isnt just not working, its hugely damaging?

we supposedly did, but its clear we didnt. I have never in RL heard Richard Silverwood give a penalty for 'repositioning in the tackle' i dont think we will hear that call again this year. Im not getting in to whether the refereeing in this series was good, bad or indifferent, but it wasnt SL interpretations.

I suppose that is one way of looking at it. To me atm it seems like the top of SL is attainable to most teams in SL with hard graft. Without a SC it would be the richest would prosper and the rest would fold trying to compete pretty much like in the early nineties when Wigan were flashing the cash.

ATEOTD the best way to solve this conundrum would be if we got a TV deal like the EPL. However we'd still probably make a mess of our sport

With an SC we have seen 4 clubs win everything, the 4 richest clubs at that time and we have seen multiple clubs go bust.

Our last three deals have all, according to the RFL, been record TV deals, according to Brian Barwick this season has seen a 60%+ increase in funds going to clubs. We have seen a 0% increase in salary.

The fact is that when a Koukash, or a Hetherington or Lenegan or Moran or Davy ask for an increase in cap or marquee exemption they are castigated as wasting money, and McManus et al are praised for their lack of spending on players. As if that isnt something every business in the world would want, a cap on how much they and their competitors pay staff keeping wages down. Its easy to run a business if you dont have to pay your staff very much.

We could get the premier leagues tv deal, some owners would still be saying it isnt enough.

On a brighter note, At least the corner stone of this great side, the Burgess Twins, wear our international jersey.