spot on, i wish the people who ran the game thought of the bigger picture! you might have to change your name soon pom, not too sure about the deluded part anymore!

Thanks hutch. I think

Just to clarify here, you think the RLIF cannot announce that from 2012 onwards they will use a 'one nation for life' policy because they used a different policy in the past? So no-one can ever make a new rule about representative qualifications, or in any other area?

Utter nonsense! I am so glad you aren't my lawyer.

You can keep whineing and calling everyone in positions of power idiots for the rest of your life i suppose, or you could take a moment to think about it, and realise if it were all as simple as you think it is, it would have happened 10 years ago.

Maybe they will be able to get a set of rules in place similar to soccer some day, but it won't be done at the stroke of a pen because you want it to happen. It will have to take account of all the precedents they have made over the years because the only way three quarters of our teams exist is because they have been allowed to bend any rule at any time - and if you now want to stop one player using the same rules as another player, he will kill you in court (assuming you are stupid enough to waste money going there).

Again, if the world were as simple as you think it is, they would already be doing it.

So you are saying that they cannot introduce new rules?

Nonsense. How do you think other sports manage to do it then? FIFA changed their requirements just a year or so ago, so that if a player went to school in a country that he has no birth/ancestral/residential links to then he can qualify to play for them. How did they manage that if it's not possible to ever change the rules? Or does this threat of legal action only apply to RL and no other sport?

The real reason changes have not been made is that whenever the RFL have tried to do something about it the ARL and NZRL block them. And that comes directly from Richard Lewis himself.

You're the one making things simplistic. You are assuming that player B is being stopped from playing for a team but he'll take you to court because player A did it previously under the same circumstances but prior to a rule change. That's rubbish. As long as ALL players are governed by the same rule change then what comeback does player B have? You might as well say that the rules will NEVER change because there will always be a precedent somewhere down the line. We may as well do away with the RLIF (not a bad idea) because they are not allowed to make any new rules according to you.