Seriously? How can the top clubs losing their star players year on year to the NRL and other codes not mean the competition is weakening? How can no good players coming from the NRL anymore not mean the competition here is getting weaker? The youngsters coming through are great but how is watching glorified academy matches some weeks because clubs dont even have proper squads signs of strong competition?

Yes Cas have been great and have been the best team to watch this season but so what? One swallow doesnt make a summer.

Do you seriously think Wigan are anywhere near as good as last year? We have had 7 or 8 players out on a regular basis and could still finish top. Saints are a poor team compared to teams of the last decade and they are top, Leeds are probably as bad as they have been for some time as are Warrington who arent a patch on the teams of 2 or 3 seasons ago. The other top club of the SL era, Bradford, has just been relegated. The likes of Hull FC, Hull KR, Wakefield have been as big a shambles as they have ever been. Indeed Hull FC are a big club and have seriously gone backwards since winning the Challenge Cup and getting to the Grand Final.

With your comments about the NRL and Super League I can only presume you dont watch the NRL. In the NRL teams strive for excellance and improvement each year which means that it is never predicatable and anyone can beat anyone. All, or most clubs, spend to the cap and it is a real challenge just to finish in the top 8 never mind win it. Almost every club has some star players and the salary cap is growing each year, and it dwarfs ours which also means it can target the best players from all over. The intensity, speed and fitness levels are on a different planet to SL never mind the skill levels.

Then we have with Super League, a competition where the salary cap has remained largely stagnent for over a decade and the amount of star players declines year on year. What few are left are has beens whose best years are behind them. At times this season some games have even resembled a u23 competition. Yes there is the odd upset because the top teams dont take half the matches seriously, as it is a doddle to finish in the top 8 and they dont really matter, but that is not the competition getting stronger.

We were seconds off beating NZ last year, and have beaten them many times in the past as GB

Historically we've shown we can compete in one-off games but in a series not so much. The point is though that the quality of English/British players hasn't changed a huge amount during the Super League era. The difference is that most of the best English/British players are now not playing in Super League.

You've also got a significant reduction in the number of high quality Australian and Kiwi players in the competition. Add the two together and I'd say you've probably got a whole squads worth of top drawer talent missing from Super League compared to a decade ago.

That can't be helping the overall quality of the competition can it?

As an example, if you look at the 1995 World Cup. The English and Welsh teams had 5 players in their squad that had been recruited from Union, with just 1 player from the NRL.

Of the Australian squad that year, 6 would play in Super League, 9 of the NZ would do, plus around a dozen from Samoa and the likes of Adrian Lam too.

In contrast, in the 2013 squad, we had 0 players from Union and 7 (inc Sam and Mossop) from the NRL.

None of the Australian squad have or do play in Super League. None of the Kiwi squad do, with only Lealuia having ever done so. The SL Samoan representatives was down to around 30% of the 95 tally.

Is it really improvement?

Sam was arguably the biggest recent export to the NRL, so we may well expect his departure to lower the quality of the side and SL in general, but imo Bowen has produced more in 2014 than Sam did in 2013. Even when it comes to the youngsters, they are holding their own and often exceeding expectations when they replace established stars.

Not sure how you've come to that conclusion, but Sam scored 23 SL tries and made 21 assists in 2013, so far Bowen has got 11 tries and 12 assists. Bowen has been very good for us this season but he's not in the same league attack wise as Tomkins IMO. I've no doubt he would have been the difference in the tight game, poor performances against Bradford and Hull KR.