Not sure if that still stacks up anymore, I'm sorry to say.

At its full time professional level RU has a much broader national spread than RL, it has a fully competitive European tournament and twice yearly international rounds of games.

It attracts greater media attention because it has all the bases covered, not because there is any sort of bias - thats the sort of thinking that makes RL so insular and will condemn it ever to be second best in the media's eyes.

You're right .... it does now.

It is finally justifying the bias that has always been ingrained regardless of what it had to offer.

Yet the single game rugby league game received 50% more support through attendance than the 2 Union games, plus the TV audience. If Union has such a broad national appeal then why don't more people attend?

If the papers and media want to report 2/3/4 times as much coverage for England Rugby Union than England Rugby League then fair enough, the attendances warrant that. Yet the papers and media aren't doing that, they're reporting 2/3/4 times as much coverage for domestic rugby union games which (in this instance) was obviously 3 or 4 times less popular than it's rugby league counterpart.

Lets be honest, its always had a wide spread (location wise) appeal and the further we go back in history the more apparent that is, and its always had its home internationals and full international games, EVERY year.

Its always going to be a much easier game to sell for that very reason, in fact RL can probably count itself lucky (thank Sky for that) that it gets the coverage it does - ice hockey and speedway to think of just two sports have a far greater national spread than RL and get virtually no national press attention.

Because the two things are not isolated, the coverage that the RU international seasons get are reflected in the domestic leagues too and as tvoc states, the English premier league clubs regularly pull bigger crowds week after week than Super League - the only thing that kept up the averages for RL was when Leeds could attract 17-20K crowds for the majority of home games - doesn't happen now.

But they're not reflected in the domestic leagues, if they were they would be getting Premier League (football) like attendances, they're not, they're getting Super League like attendances although admittedly slightly higher recently. I don't see how slightly higher domestic attendances warrants the vast difference in coverage of domestic Union to domestic League. It's just that the people who make the decisions live & work in the south where Union is king over League. If they lived & worked in Leeds or Hull I'm 99% sure they would be making different decisions over coverage.

No, its because the people who put those papers together have only one thing in mind - to sell as many copies as they can and like it or not the press coverage of RL against RU reflects the English RU saturation of all forms of media and its perception as the only truly national form of rugby (which its always had by right)

Now we may know there is a professional RL team in London (but not many Londoners do) and we might shuffle our feet and embarassingly point to Wrexham and pretend that its a Welsh club, but thats it, we have a token French club at professional level and another semi-pro one division down but everything else is concentrated on the infamous M62 corridor in just the same way as it always has been and no matter how much you explain London/Wales/France to news editors they will see straight through the camouflage and window dressing.

It also doesn't help that we've had super league clubs in liquidation for the past three years either.

I would agree on the "national" nature of Union compared to League, which is why expansion is so important, but does that mean that the 14,000 average Union crowd is 3 or 4 times more important than the 10,500 average League crowd? I'm not saying Union shouldn't get coverage or even that League should necessarily get more coverage than Union, just that we get our fair share, regardless of where the people who are interested in each code happen to live.

You forgot to mention that Hape, one of the best RL centres in recent years can't pass, draw a man, defend in the right place or make a proper tackle. Remember they are as fit as league players these days, they have two extra player on the pitch and they don't have to retire 10 metres when they defend. There is less space and less time and you can't afford to get isolated when you are tackled. All those factors influence how the game is played.

It's a different game. Don't compare it with League, it doesn't work. It makes for a much happier life if you accept this.

And by the same token, would you actually want to court publicity for the pi$$poor efforts by England / GB RL sides in recent years ?

Again I might agree that they do now.

While the home unions in the Northern Hemispere have always had their 'Five Nations' it's only since the advent of official professionalism that they have added significantly with an Autumn series. Prior to '96 I don't recall they had too much by comparison to full scale RL GB Tours down under and the visits from the Kangaroo/Kiwi providing a series somewhere every other year.

Of course they had the collective 'Lions' but such events came round with less frequency. A trip to take on the 'All Blacks' being a once in a career type event.

As for the printed media IMO League is on a hiding to nothing outside the heartlands and that would also be the case in large measure irrespective of the relative merits of the two sports.

No but you miss my point I wasn't moaning about the lack of media coverage. Just giving a reason why get more media coverage. The ru team has made the last two world cup finals winning one. As a result geting honors from the queen much more exposed to media.

But to answer your question no I wouldn't want our team that don't really achive anything (England)

Heres a question for tvoc or similar - when the GB RL team was redefined as "England" did we deny ourselves access to any quality players who may instead now have to play for Scotland, Wales or NI and have they since discovered that their grandfather was not after all born in Auchtermuchty, they got confused with Bury ?

Is there ever any chance of having a competitive four nations competition in RL and would it not be fairer if the Australians split their team down into its component parts when they play us - ie State of Origin (although I readily admit that both SoO teams would p[iis[/is all over England even more than the Australian national team would)

Read an interesting stat on SSN the other week. Johnny Wilkinson England career, 1,111pts - 6 tries. That does say it all about the game.

No, he tackles well above his weight, and used to get injured a lot doing so. Apparently has been playing some good stuff.

No i ain't saying he's rubbish, i'm a fan of him myself. Just using that stat and him as an example to show how much kicking's involved in the game and why its nickname is 'Yawnion.'

by and large i think they are trying to run it more, Ashton, Foden and Cueto are decent attacking players. Fly halves seem to get their attacking instincts coached out of them, Andrew was the same, legend has it he got boll0cked for running the ball from under his own posts en debut (against romania iirc), Barnes was a cracking attacking fly half, but largely lost out to Andrew, Flood actually went through a gap for the first try

Surprised that so much goal kicking is involved in Union and that the first choice goal kicker should kick all of them ?

Not really, he's been in the full England squad since March 98.

If he wasn't such a good number 10, Stuart Barnes would have made a belting number 6 if you follow my drift.

The problem seems to be that RL fans want to turn RU into RL (hence my tongue in cheek statement above), rather than just enjoy RU for what it is, a different game.

Just for the record my post wasn't aimed at anyone in particular just based what I had read on twitter etc

However a lot of you have bitten on to what I said and it's sad how people pick it apart, two different games, two different cultures

There attendences smash ours at the minute

Lawrie, you do know it's our off season don't you....

To be honest I barely saw Hape touch the ball (I remember him having a run through the midfield about 10 mins in and after that not a lot). But then that's why he went to Union aint it...to prolong his career and protect his worn out Knees

BTW those saying how much better Union club attendences are these days don't forget the figures are massively skewed by the annual wembley games (where large numbers of tickets are given away...I'm not knocking that we should do the same for Millenium Magic to get local kids there).

Plenty of top flight Union clubs are struggling with over-inflated salaries, low attendances and internationals disrupting the season/taking away attention. So it's no gold plated standard that we can compare SL to.

PS I live in Gloucestershire and work in Bristol so am giving my perspective as someone living in a Union "Heartland"