That cant be done though can it. Even if it could if the quality of coaching, training etc is all the same then it is hardly going to raise intensity or produce a better standard of competition. It would just mean we have worse players playing in their place and standards would fall. Simply getting rid of imports and nothing else will not help.

Why does it not surprise me you are saying not to reduce the imports.

I am bet that if Wigan had kept hold of players instead of binning them for Jonny Foreigner you'd be agreeing.

Look at Eastwood and Orford. Would homegrown players just run off home if things were not going their way?

Who have we 'binned' since Lindsay and Whelan left?

Wigan now have the some of the best youngsters in the competition, at least five will get starting shirts for England soon

Here we go people blinded by club prejudices. Try getting off your high horse for a second, did I say I wouldnt reduce them? If I had my way I would reduce them to 3. That way you would get top quality imports and get rid of the likes of Phelps and Bailey who dont offer any more than an English player. However with the Kolpak players and the amount of Australian's and Kiwis with British ancestry there will always be ways around it. If its illegal to prevent it then there isnt much you can do about it.

Also I think you will find if imports where banned completely then Wigan would fare far better than other clubs but it would only lower the standard of the competition as a whole and do nothing to further English RL.

The reduction in overseas players will not magically sprout 100's of world class english players. It's a fallacy that overseas players stop the development of the best english player. I would argue that they improve those players bringing a higher level of competition and skill to SL and therefore leading to better players.

I would remove the limitations on overseas players entirely, but to complement that I would have the RFL provide financial incentives to clubs who produce players who go on to play international/representative rugby.

get rid of the french team unless you increase the number to three.as things stand they serve no purpose.

reduce SLE to twelve teams.
reduce the number of antips.
get rid of the salary cap to allow clubs to compete only for the best antips and the best RU players.
a decent transfer to clubs outside SLE to make it worthwhile producing youngsters of the necessary quality for SLE.

I agree with your comments in the first paragraph. There will always be ways round it but once clubs start benefiting it will be easier.

However, how would banning imports do nothing? It would give players from the lower division a chance at Superleague. Lunt for example was playing for Workington when the Giants signed him 2 years ago. Had he not be given that chance would he have turned out for England this morning?

Quality British players are out there but there are few teams prepared to put the effort in. The RFL rule on home trained players has already started to make a difference. Wigan, as a previous poster has said, have 5 lads who will break through soon, this should reduce the requirement for so many foreign accents at Wigan and allow another batch to come through. There are 12 clubs who should be developing at least 5 British youngsters this year (and a few French and Welsh ones!)

Are people seriously suggesting that the NL players are the international players being forced out by imports?

FFS making our competition even worse is not going to improve the exposure to pressure the top 30 or so players we need for internationals. They will just be used to either: playing as the star player in a crap team against generally crap team if the salary cap distributes skill; or just amplifying a top few teams that play against NL standard teams and occasionally against each other for decent intensity.

We need to increase the pool to select from, not just the amount that make it out.

Since 1982 clubs etc., have spouted this and and yet strangely there has been no improvement in the results!!!!!

Why does everyone keep saying we under performed? That players are a lot better than what they showed today?
Are they really any better? Or are the Aussies & NZ actually that much better than us. We can't keep saying players underperformed year in year and and justify archaic coaching techniques based on 1 game every 4 years we pull out of the bag. Michael Maguire went to Wigan this year and brought a new approach to coaching and took the same players and made them champions. This is what we need to do throughout Rugby League. A new modern approach to the game has to be brought in. The Mcnamaras, Mcdermotts and Lowes of this game need to be replaced. The brass at HQ need to be shipped out and the game needs to be looked at properly by people who want to bring the game forward.

I am all for giving younger players a chance and Wigan have benefited from that but it has to be in the right environment. Simply replacing all quota players with young English players is only going to make the standard and intensity of the competition far worse as in many cases they are no where near as good as the players they are replacing. That is why I think 3 is ideal as it seperates the quality import from those that are no better than English players. Getting rid of quota players completely will in my opinion just result in a similar situation that has been seen in the academy where young players are playing at a fairly pathetic standard with only 3 over age players allowed and the standard has fallen through the floor. The younger players still need to play against better players to improve and get them ready for internationals.

The problem you'll always find with any number of imports be it 1 or 3 or 5, is that they always tend to be the players that take up the creative positions in teams. Hookers, Half BAcks etc...... thats where we fall down. Creativity has always been a problem with GB RL. And anyone with any size as a kid automatically gets taught how to play prop. If Greg Inglis had come from Halifax he'd be doing 20 minute spells for James Graham now.....

no matter what we do we will never compete as long as RL is behind many other sports,even if RL become the no.1 sport in britain it would probibly struggle as britain is not well know to developing finely tuned athletes is it?

There needs to be a 'root and branch' shake up at Red Hall and no more jobs for the boys. When you have people like BJ Mather as Head of Player Development and the woefully inept Dave Rotheram as National Player Development Manager then you get what you deserve.

Obviously this would only work if the top teams kept hold of their academy players, as they never seem to come to much when they've been moved on.

It's about time we had a proper way for young internationals to get used to
Paying international rugby.

Maybe a u19's playing in the European competition, and touring every few years.

Its about all the clubs in SL putting the resources in to develop the next generation of young talent.

Most professional RL clubs pay lip service to developing juniors.

I think St.Helens are an example of a club doing something right on the junior front. For a small town Saints develop a lot of high calibre youngsters.

You would expect that other RL clubs with far larger catchment areas would have far more talent at their disposal. Yet strangely they dont.

The players are out there, they just need to be identified from a young age, then developed to their potential.

I agree entirely.

I'd say only Wigan, St.helens, Warrington, Leeds and Huddersfield are up to a high enough standard.


=#FFFFFFAwaits massive backlash

What can England do to catch up?
Maybe the question should be is it possible to catch up? Remember that RL is more of a majority sport in the southern hemisphere. Whilst our kids are out pretending to be Wayne Rooney in their free time, Aussie kids are trying to emulate Billy Slater or Lockyer (or some RU player or cricketer!). The vast majority of kids in England, outside the very small minority heartland, have no interest in playing RL. It's a minority sport in our country! It's a fact that successful international teams are developed when the sport they are playing is a national game, so Americans produce the best basket-ball and baseball players, European and south american countries produce the best footballers, and Australia produce the best cricketers and rugby players. Yes, there may be occasional exceptions as sport goes through peaks and troughs, but this is the exception and not the rule.
Next, we cannot hope to compete with such an inept coach. Steve McNamara was a failure at club level. If we are happy to let a coach with absolutely no experience of success coach the national team, why on earth would we expect any different?
And finally, put simply, our players are not as good as the Australians or New Zealanders. Australia beat us comfortably without the services of Inglis, Hayne, Falou or Thurston in the backs. We just have to accept that many of our players are nowhere near the level of their opposition.

So does anyone think the RFL will actually do anything? do they here the fans complaints and fears? If they do, do they jsut turn a blind eye and pretend that everything is rosey.

The short term solution is to send more english young players and players in general to the NRL. Though i'd much rather SL kept the top players and worked on becoming a great comp instead of a mediocre one with occasional flashes of brilliance. The RFL should hurry along the culling of foreign player numbers. Not to 0 but to something like 3.

Nothing wrong with top quality aussies or NZers but SL clubs bring over far to many poor players who are just looking for a run around.

My opinion, nothing is wrong with the forward's they can match it with us and the kiwis any day of the week. It's the backs more specificly the centres and wingers. They need to set up an academy to teach them how to defend

Someone else on this forum pointed out recently that including SOO, the Aussies play about 7 representative games a season.

We play...3.

Until we can get competative games from Wales and France, we need another layer above SL for rep games, and that natural model is the County of Origin.

It might be parochial and tied to our northern routes, but if it helps us beat the Aussies, who cares?

Like the licensing system is showing fruit, like the salary cap is showing fruit this too isnt an instant fix and needs a couple of seasons to bed in.

RL in this country has been discarding failed plans because the didnt produce instant results since 1982 and we havent got close to winning yet. What we need is to settle on a BIG plan and stick to it.

The team selected this time was young and untried, now they are tried and tested and whilst having come up short know what its like for next time, know whats needed of them.

the Other nationalities team will provide that step up that france and wales are'nt capable of at the moment...

I dont think it will, I think it will be a one sided farce and the fundamental problem remains. England will be playing against Super League players at a Super League intensity, it will not be a step up at all. A other nationalities team would be no better than the New Zealand team containing only English based players that England demolished a few years ago.

This aside, what is in it for the other nationalties players? They are hardly going to be paid loads for the game either to make it worthwhile and potential players may not even want to play in it and risk injury for no real beneift to them. Would clubs even release players in the middle of the season for what isnt an international side? If they did get players to play will they really put their bodies on the line and give 100% in a meaningless match? If players couldnt take Lancashire v Yorkshire matches seriously they certainly wont take this seriously.

If players didnt take Lancs v Yorks games seriously, its because they new the GB/England selectors paid them no attention.

SOO is taken so seriously because the players know its the benchmark for the National side. If the RFL can simply engender the same culture of the best players get picked for the County sides, and the best players from the county sides get picked for England (or Wales, Scotland etc) then the players will take it seriously.

But then we are back to the age old problem of the clubs themselves, being too short sighted to realise that whats good for the game is good for them, rather than the other way round.