I take it as flattering that another sport is considering mirroring ours to reach the levels of entertainment that we achieve.

Tony Ward is a 'senior' person in RU and his solitary piece means 'another sport is considering'?

Meanwhile in other rugby league news, Scotland's wheelchair curlers have lost 6-3 to Germany in their relegation play-off at the World Championships in Finland.

*spoiler* cheers i was going to watch that later

Union is already evolving, the rucks are becoming more like rugby league in that teams want to put as few people into the contact area as they can get away with.

Whereas before sides might have been committing 6 or 7 players into the ruck leaving 8 or 9 to play in space, now they may only throw 3 or 4 into the contact area. That leaves 11 or 12 players spreading out across the width of the pitch in defence, much as there would be in league.

Unlike in league however, the offside line in union is the back foot of the ruck rather than 10 metres away from it. Combine that with the recent trend towards "blitz" defences, and attacking players get absolutely zero space to work in unless the ball is recycled quickly. So teams try to avoid taking the ball into contact, but players lack the basic skills to keep it moving, offload in the tackle, run the correct lines etc.

So you end up with some turgid knockonathon of endless reset scrums, or sides choosing to kick because they don't back their own handling ability. Taking two players out may create additional space, but unless the offside line changes it won't create the additional time on the ball that creative players need to flourish.

It may not help your creative players, but your elusive runners like Eastmond would be far more effective with less players on the pitch.

Pot, kettle...
It's interesting that you magically appear every time there is a post vaguely related to union.
It is also interesting that you adopt the exact same style of post as a certain Mr. Gutterfax.

Thats because i like Union and League. You always seem to magically appear on Union threads too. Pot, kettle...

Just a journalist wanting to push some buttons.

It wouldn't harm rugby league.
If the dropped flankers those same players would be lost to the game as they would find it hard to move to another position in the rugby union team.
The tall ones would become locks or No.8 if more mobile but there are only so many places.

Rugby League lends itself to a flanker friendly style of play. Big running forwards who are fit enough to get around the field will find a place in all the pack positions in League.
Let them change it. We'll take their cast offs and make them good rugby players.

Erm...
I have posted in one Union related discussion since you 'joined' RLFANS... meanwhile I haven't seen a single post from you yet regarding the actual game of rugby league.
Keep digging Gutters, it is embarrassing but yet so, so funny at the same time.

Quote ="galliant"Tony Ward is a 'senior' person in RU and his solitary piece means 'another sport is considering'? '" Its not one man and a single opinion piece. The is being quite openly discussed in the union press. www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2 ... orthampton

Quote ="galliant"Tony Ward is a 'senior' person in RU and his solitary piece means 'another sport is considering'? '" Its not one man and a single opinion piece. The is being quite openly discussed in the union press. www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2 ... orthampton

Quote ="GlobalRugby"Its not one man and a single opinion piece. The is being quite openly discussed in the union press. www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2 ... orthampton'" Rugby League changes the way video refs are engaged and nobody mentions it in the press, but a long retired Irish fly-half gets his musings published in an irish paper and it's headline news? Union seems to have "done it again", stealing media coverage with a nothing story (you're/we're discussing it here on an unrelated sports forum)......is this really the basis for a viable thread on a RL board? This is more worrying [urlhttp://www.bbc.com/sport/0/rugby-league/31497227[/url

Quote ="GlobalRugby"Its not one man and a single opinion piece. The is being quite openly discussed in the union press. www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2 ... orthampton'" Rugby League changes the way video refs are engaged and nobody mentions it in the press, but a long retired Irish fly-half gets his musings published in an irish paper and it's headline news? Union seems to have "done it again", stealing media coverage with a nothing story (you're/we're discussing it here on an unrelated sports forum)......is this really the basis for a viable thread on a RL board? This is more worrying [urlhttp://www.bbc.com/sport/0/rugby-league/31497227[/url

Is this really so worrying ?
A top league player is tempted to try the other code, so what !
If union can come up with the cash and make an offer that Inglis can't refuse, what can we actually do about it.

In the UK, there is a massive disparity between the spending power of Union over League but, this isn't the case down under.
And if Inglis is considering a switch it mean one of only two possibilities.
Either he genuinely wants to try the other code or, he wants to negotiate a better contract in league.

If players want to gamble their future in the other code we should not stop them.
How can we, as supporters of RL, complain about poaching players, when for 30/40 years we were trying ourselves to cherry pick players from the other code
and as happened in reverse, there were no guarantees of success.
Some players adapt well and others fail but, you cant stop anyone moving.
What we have to do is make League the better option so that fewer players are tempted.

NRL Salary cap is AU$5,500,000...the Aviva Premiership is up to £5,500,000.
According to xe.com that's AU$10,880,000, so close to doube the NRL.
The French have a cap of AU$14,500,000.

=#0000802014 /15 Salary Cap
Each season's Salary Cap will be officially announced in January previous to the start of that season therefore the 2014/15 Salary Cap was announced on 21 January 2014 confirming the following:
£4.76 million - Senior Salary Cap
£240,000 - Academy Credits * see definition below
1 Excluded Player (Salary is not included in the Salary Cap)
Injury Replacement *** see notes below
Clubs can also benefit from the £200,000 Academy Cap which supports the development and retention of home grown talent at each Club.

=#800000NRL PAYMENTS FOR THE TOP 25
$5.5 million - Basic payments for the Top 25 players including Sponsor Servicing Allowance ($5.3m) which is automatically given to all clubs to compensate players for club sponsorship activities including appearances and endorsements.
Long Serving Player Allowance ($200K) for eligible players who have played eight continuous years of grade football with that club including Holden Cup and NSW Cup.

+ $231,250 - Paid by the NRL to the RLPA towards players' Retirement Account Contribution.

+ $100,000 - Paid by the NRL to the RLPA towards their administration funding.

*Payments under the actual salary cap total $5.50 million paid directly by clubs across the Top 25 players. The additional $331,250 paid into the RLPA Retirement and Administration Fund Contribution is not defined as a salary cap payment.

What players can earn outside the salary cap:

$600,000 - Marquee Player Allowance - any or all of the Top 25 players at each club can share in payments made by club sponsors seeking to use a player's intellectual property. These may be guaranteed in the playing contract by clubs.
$100,000 - Motor Vehicle Allowance – a maximum amount of five motor vehicles may be provided to players in the Top 25 outside of the salary cap. (Valued at $20,000 each).

Unlimited - Players can earn unlimited amounts from corporate sponsors who are not associated with the club and who do not use the game's intellectual property (no club logos, jerseys or emblems) provided these are pre-approved. These agreements may not be negotiated by the club as an incentive for a player to sign a contract, nor can they be guaranteed by the club.

Unlimited - Tertiary education fees, approved traineeships, medical insurance costs, relocation/temporary accommodation costs are not included in the cap but must be approved.

All very complex, however. I was interested to see how many players would that cover, so I popped onto the Leicester Tigers website and their 1st team squad is (unless I miss counted) 49 players strong. So yes the cap is bigger in the English RU. But also the number of players this is spread across is nearly twice as many. The NRL cap is about the top 25 players. So spending power per player is not that dissimilar once all the add on's are taken into account.

However, Union have a huge 1 player excluded from the cap, therefore they could spend anything to bring a marque player in.
Also none of the cap as far as I can see cover the amount England can pay to a player. So you can see the draw for Burgess if he gets a marque allowance + England fees then he can name his price.


Funnily enough the academy players get roughly the same cap. $400,000 and £200,000 for each league. No idea how much that is per player as I did not look at academy sizes.

Which is all well and good, but as the discussion had slid into a debate about financial attractiveness, I'll ask you which has the larger salary cap? Not how many players are needed, or how many kids/home grown are covered, but simply, which has the larger salary cap?
Also, which has a marquee player allowance, that would enable Inglis to be signed off the cap?

2 options here

NRL or Aviva Premiership?

Again I find myself questioning the sanity of normally sane posters when it comes to admitting that we sit down the pecking order across a number of off-field comparisons in regard to Union.

It's a moot point as Rugby Union has been scientifically proven to be so boring that time takes at least 3 x longer to pass, therefore warping the Union players perception of how hard he's worked for his salary. In effect the average Union player perceives himself to have worked 3 times longer for his money meaning that Rugby League players, for whom time passes twice as fast as normal, only work for one sixth of the time for the same money. This means that any comparison of the respective salary caps need to have the Union cap divided by 3 while the League cap is times two.

Hope that helps

Or in other words

Who gives a feck about Union it's tripe!

They do have a point. 15 fit guys (or as fit as Union players can be) averaging out at 6ft make pitch dimensions designed for 5ft 5in nicotine-sucking Weebles seem cramped.

I wouldn't put it past the ruggeroids to drop to 13-a-side.

The pressure would then naturally build for some kind of merger.

The only defence would be return to position specialisation, thus making player switches more challenging.

I can't say I'd be opposed to greater specialisation. I've mentioned such in the past as a possible answer to increased Union poaching to a chorus of ROLLEYES. On the surface, returning to a form of rugby in which stand-offs and second-row forwards possess complex non-transferrable skillsets seems like an anachronism. But I don't see why it isn't possible to return to a more tactically diverse game whilst retaining the benefits afforded by full professionalism such as increased fitness, athleticism, size etc.

Watching James Graham demanding the ball at first receiver for England with five minutes remaining against the Australians (and functioning as well as any attacking pivot that day) is a measure of how ball skill has undoubtedly improved ten-fold since the day when the best scrum half the country could field, Deryck Fox, failed miserably to match Graham's attacking threat in eighty minutes at Wembley.

But if props can now comfortably fill in in the halves we have surely past the point when terms such as "prop", "scrum half", "winger" are also anachronisms. If League follows its own tradition of cutting away extraneous parts of the game (a tradition it has admittedly profited from) then it must inevitably consider simplifying positional terms - perhaps to just "forwards" and "backs", or even doing away with the lot in an Orwellian move to make discussion of the game practically impossible.

given the number of your posts in threads that discuss union, that answer you seek is YOY DO

YOY DO?

Is that some yokel, M4, West Country, village idiot type speak?

I don't comment on Rugby Union threads, I comment on Rugby League threads on a Rugby League forum, threads that have been derailed by you.

typo police....It's about the best you have.
As for the thread, it's topic and me derailing it......lol.....
it's a thread about Union....you are commenting on it and I didn't change/derail it. You're infatuated with union.......seriously...seek help

You are right to some degree, I am fascinated with how something so evidently rubbish, something that is so turgid, boring and lacking in high quality skill can get so much media coverage and in turn attract so much money.

In every aspect where Union shares commonality with The a Greatest Game, the Union skills are practiced to an almost juvenile standard in comparison. Technically the skills in Rugby Union are akin to those in 1970s Rugby League, union skills are simply awfull!

It's a bit like the story of the Emporers New Clothes, I'm just waiting for Prince William to be sat in the altogether in his Twikkers seat when some kid shouts, "this is boring" and everyone will realise that Billies naked and Rugby a Unions God damned awfull to watch.

YOY need to be careful there officer.....
btw......find a post where I've ever said league isn't a better game than union! As I'm new here, why not trawl through gutterfax's 21000 too......you won't find one. It's the administration of league that's cap and
e need for some fans to laugh at the bigger and more popular game in the hope at some imaginary visitor to this forum will think league is a bigger game

I never said you did, either as enigmatic or Gutterfax.

I also never said The Greatest Game was bigger but it's imeasurably better

We agree.
we're not dating, but it's a start