Not sure if you were fishing or not, but here you are JB


Exhibit A:
More Kiwi born players in Group A than Irish Born players. A quick glance sees 43 Englishmen, 37 Australians, 12 Fijians and 4 Kiwis in the group. 56/96 playing for their country of Birth (58.6%)
Exhibit B:
8 Samoan born players in Group B, with 21 French, 22 from PNG, 32 Kiwis, a Tongan and 12 Aussies. 67/96 playing for their country of Birth (69.8%)
Exhibit C:
36 Australian born players, 18 English born players, 8 Kiwis, 6 Tongans, 2 Scots and 2 Italians make up the 72 players in Group C. 10/72 playing for their country of birth (13.9%)
Exhibit D:
31 Australian born players grace Group D together with 11 Kiwis, 11 English born players, 9 Welsh, 7 Americans, 2 Cook Islanders and a South African. 18/72 playing for their country of birth (25%)

336 Registered players at RLWC 2013, 151 of which will play for the country of their birth (45%)
Australia 116, followed by England 72 deliver 188 players (56%), then New Zealand 55, PNG 22 and France 21 bring in another 98 (29%) meaning the remaining 9 teams will deliver 15%.
Fiji 12, Wales 9, Samoa 8, Tonga 7, USA 7, Cooks, Italy and Scotland 2 each with a rogue South African thrown in for fun are providing 50 players between them!

And the England RU team employ a New Zealand dialect coach and an Afrikaans interpreter who also works with the English cricket team. On occasions the golden boys from Twickenham have needed with Samoan and Fijian accents as well.

The Welsh, Italian and Scottish RU teams have had their fair share of Antipodean accents also.

Is your dismissive allegation relevant to them as well or are you just denigrating our game ?

Great stats

It would be wonderful to comare those figures against the total demographic of the game.

and then track the changes as the game grows, in international competitions and world cups.

only by tracking such statistics can one genuinely point to a cultural shift in the game...

ps such statistics in isolation are pointless... but as a benchmark? excellent!

Correct........but I doubt that in the RWC, FIFA WC, Cricket WC or any other WC apart from maybe the Aussie Rules World Cup, does 1 country deliver 34.5% of the competitors




I allege nothing.....I stated figures that at worst are possible 1 or 2 players out of 336. Just because you don't like the figures doesn't make them allegations



BTW.....re-read my post. I opened with the gambit that it was in response to a potential fishing expedition....chillax and enjoy the Rugby FFS

My children were born in one country but have citizenship in three. How do you know this is not the case here, especially with the South Sea islanders.?

I have live in my present country for 45 of my 67 years and have represented them at RU through residency but I have a Yorkshire accent. I now have citizenship in that country but did not when I played for them. I have every right to have played for that country.

What I am saying is that international qualification criteria are what they are and many many countries take advantage of them in multiple different sports. Why do you find it necessary to single out RL ?

Agree 100%
Both codes here in NZ are packed with Pacific Island talent. NZ and Australia are seen as places to head to for Islanders and therefore it's no surprise that the Island teams squads have 29 locally born players out of a possible 96.
In the UK, Wigan's sourcing of talent from Wales is really starting to pay dividends and of all the "expansion" areas, I see Wales as a real hope for the future.

Social demographics play a massive part in where "people come from"...Estimates put the Irish Diaspora at 100,000,000.......not bad for a rock with 6 million or so on it.

My post was tongue in cheek....some posters (not you BTW) need to chillax

Yawn.....

This will be the best World Cup ever,cannot wait just counting the days!

Can always trust gutterfax to derail a thread on international rugby league.

He has a point though. The game has been undersold and terribly managed for many years. RU is far better marketed and if only the RFL could copy some of the initiatives and objectives from RU then RL would climb.

Yep we soooo need to be copying RU! After all its not like they have financial problems, clubs going broke, being booted out of competitions or disharmony at the way the game is being run! www.heraldsun.com.au/sport/rugby ... 6741127303 www.stuff.co.nz/sport/rugby/news ... 15-9m-loss www.radionz.co.nz/news/sport/993 ... ial-losses au.sports.yahoo.com/league/news/ ... -problems/

Yep we soooo need to be copying RU! After all its not like they have financial problems, clubs going broke, being booted out of competitions or disharmony at the way the game is being run! www.heraldsun.com.au/sport/rugby ... 6741127303 www.stuff.co.nz/sport/rugby/news ... 15-9m-loss www.radionz.co.nz/news/sport/993 ... ial-losses au.sports.yahoo.com/league/news/ ... -problems/

May I suggest an appointment with SpecSavers in Perth JB? You are merely highlighting 'some' issues within a sport that is light years ahead of RL off the field. They know how to sell 2.3 MILLION tickets for the RWC. Being a person from RU, despite loving and converting to the on field sport of RL, I know what I am saying. RU also knows very well how to develop their sport in new territories hence the newly proposed National Rugby League in the US. Shame about the name, but RL authorities will continue with apathy. vanguardrugby.com/national-footb ... by-league/

May I suggest an appointment with SpecSavers in Perth JB? You are merely highlighting 'some' issues within a sport that is light years ahead of RL off the field. They know how to sell 2.3 MILLION tickets for the RWC. Being a person from RU, despite loving and converting to the on field sport of RL, I know what I am saying. RU also knows very well how to develop their sport in new territories hence the newly proposed National Rugby League in the US. Shame about the name, but RL authorities will continue with apathy. vanguardrugby.com/national-footb ... by-league/

Generally if your going to choose a role model you don't pick one with major problems. Sure learn how to grow the int game but union would not be my pick of codes to model myself on generally. In fact the rfl need to look closer to home and work closer with the NRL now the game in Oz is getting its act together.

what? by pointing out where these international players actually come from? There are more South African born players at RLWC 2013 than Irish born.....the thread was designed to show how global the sport has become,........I am simply showing you the emperors new clothes




off your rocker buddy...off it totally!!!


Australia is a rock with 2 main winter sports....and luckily for the NRL and the AFL, wendyball is a summer sport, otherwise, it would simply be a matter of time before both of these Aussie staples would be playing second fiddle to the global giant.

As for Union.....I have shown elsewhere that the Irish RFU, a 3rd tier sport at best, generates more revenue from a few internationals and 4 provincial sides than the RFL....Pipe dreams about parity, let alone overtaking Union anywhere other than in NSW and Qlnd are the stuff that delivers the men in white coats.
Exhibit C: The BBC pay AU$67,000,000 cash a year for 15 games of Union each year.....the NRL gets AU$ 200,000,000 in cash and contra for 400+ games a year including SoO.

Tell me again how the RFL need to learn from an organisation that is more insular than the AFL?

As to RU marketing, yes it's miles ahead. Despite the fact I've never paid for corporate entertaining at RU. I had a call at work a few days ago from someone using my first name asking me about a corporate entertaining package at Twickenham. He assumed it was a given I'd be interested. I did however give him a blunt negative.

The problem with RL is that it sometimes seems to be ashamed of itself...if that makes sense.
It is a far superior product.....I was a lapsed ST holder at Celtic who had played Union, but the first time I went to a London Broncos game, I was hooked.....11+ years and 17,000 posts later, combined with meetings at various levels of the sport and contracts to do stuff here in NZ, I get bloody frustrated at the way the idiots in charge run the game.
This RLWC is great, but in reality, it is actually all about the M62, 2 Aussie states, Auckland and Catalan Dragons.....they deliver 80% of the combatants and no number of badges and pub teams in Serbia is going to change that!

That's a very good post. I agree with most of it.

Where I disagree is with your dismissal of the expansion of the game as being pointless and without hope.

At our beginning, we were alone in our northern fastness.

One Baskerville later and we have Australia, two states yes, but the two biggest and most populous, and New Zealand.

Along comes jean Gallia and we had France and how. Without WW11 and Vichy, French RL would today be where Australian RL is. No matter, we survived and it is Avignon that is selling out, not Catalan Perpignan.

Now we have all these fledgling league nations around the world, due , in part, probably to the RU not being able to ban us. I saw a video recently showing the amazing progress being made in Fiji with teams and in schools. This is real progress compared to absolutely nothing when I was a boy. RL in Fiji, impossible we thought.

Likewise Serbia, Ukraine, Chek Republic, Poland, Denmark, Norway. All very minor league stuff but seemingly persevering with it year on year. Small acorns etc.

Lebanon, are you kidding me ? They have a domestic league and missed the World Vup on points average.

Italy, two leagues, chaos BUT youth teams and womens teams as well as a number of men's teams.

Likewise the USA, Canada and Jamaica, heritage player and split leagues notwithstanding. Amazing.Small but amazing. 4,000 to see Canada. We had a World Cup final that didn't draw much more than that !!!

Qualifying games for the World Cup covering two continents. who could have guessed it.

Now, I know that all this is minor league stuff but if we get one more country to emerge from that lot with a vibrant league and able to compete with the Frances and Wales of this RL world, that would be progress indeed and, given our past history, who is to say that there might be some genuine international expansion of our game.

There, of course, might be no such thing but the fact that these countries play out game at all, to me, is progress.

That old chestnut eh?
Post War, as in after the Vichy s have stripped RL of it's grounds, money etc, the French did OK...admittedly, they were on fire between 1936-1939 and weren't as dominant afterwards, but they did alright . They toured down under in 51 and then had enough money to buy a nice shiny new trophy 4 years later and managed to beat NZ and Australia on the way to losing in the Final. 14 years later they saw off the Kiwis and Great Britain before losing the final to Australia....chances are, most of the French Squad that day were children during the war....4 years later they beat the Aussies but missed out on the final by points difference alone...2 years later they were still better than the Kiwis...1975 was when they started to become pretty average, 30 years after the Vichy Government's despicable act. Since then they have still managed to turn over the other three founding RL nations now and then.....and do not get me wrong, I make no excuses for the travesty bestowed upon the game by the Nazis and their collaborator scum Vichy government, but RL in France is because it was badly managed through the 70's and 80's, not because of an act of barbarity some 70 years ago.....

Hahahahaahahahahahahaha

OK, but the point I was making was that RL in France started small and grew, then regressed for whatever reason and is still here with us, weak or not. I was trying to make my point that fledgling international expansion is possible and that someday, a Serbia or Russia or really exciting to me, the USA, might just step up to become another bigger credible RL nation and that, to me, the fact that they are playing now, at whatever level, is good and not inconsequential as the poster suggested.

I don't know if there is a direct correlation or not but, it seems to me, that progress in expanding international RL, has rocketed since the RU ban was lifted and now both codes are professional a lot of the rugby apartheid which prevented us from expanding has been washed away and people worldwide are getting to see and play our game and liking what we are.

A successful world cup this year can only aid and abet this process via TV exposure or additional funding from any profits.

I think the title of this thread is not the whole truth. Yes, the power centres of the game are in two Australian states and the M62 but there is significant expansion in England and Wales and worldwide and we will see where it takes us going forward.

It's them ultras that you need to be wary of

GF has made some truthful and reasonable statements.

When people don't like what they read, they shoot the messenger.



I have often shot GF in the past, but have no need for ammo now.

1 (1) Australia 1,225.00
2 (2) New Zealand 825.00
3 (3) England 616.00
4 (4) France 233.00
5 (5) Wales 227.00
6 (4) - PNG 206.00
7 (7) Fiji 96.00
8 (6) - Samoa 77.00
9 (9) Ireland 71.00
10 (9) - Tonga 71.00
11 (10) - Scotland 70.00
12 (10) - USA 64.00
13 (13) Italy 57.00
14 (14) Russia 51.00
15 (14) - Serbia 43.00
16 (1icon_cool.gif + Canada 40.00
17 (14) - Lebanon 36.00
18 (12) - Cook Islands 36.00
19 (1icon_cool.gif - Norway 33.00
20 (17) - Germany 30.00
21 (22) + Jamaica 19.00
22 (20) - Malta 19.00
23 (23) Ukraine 17.00
24 (22) - South Africa 11.00
25 (29) + Netherlands 10.00
26 (27) + Denmark 6.00
27 (24) - Czech Republic 5.00
28 (new) Belgium 4.00
29 (27) - Sweden 2.00


official world rankings

unranked Hungary -
unranked India -
unranked Indonesia -
unranked Japan -
unranked Kingdom of Saudi Arabia -
unranked Morocco -
unranked Pakistan -
unranked Philippines -
unranked Singapore -

This is a superb post Keighley