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.

If you could persuade the players to give a rats ass about it and the incumbent international coach to consider it as a Test trial you might have a point.

Sticking it on a Wednesday night between two club rounds as done in the past will only have the same disappointing impact unfortunately.

I like Dave Woods's suggestion on the BBC website about arranging for a dozen elite young players every year to go spend time with NRL clubs as a kind of "finishing school", with the RFL subsidising their salaries to avoid cap implications for the clubs taking them on.

Exposure to what is clearly a more professional, intense environment in Australia as compared to the reserve/academy competitions in the UK can only be beneficial to their development.

I completely agree.

And that implies that the problem is one that needs fixing from the top to the bottom, root and branch if you will.

But yes, they need to be actually used as test selection games and played over a weekend without a league fixture

Agree wholeheartedly with that - the Other Nationalities idea will not produce the series of INTENSE matches we need mid-season to produce good Test footballers. And we need to be selfish about this - the point of mid-season rep games is for OUR players to go in to camp, not NRL rejects.
I still think an England v the Rest (Saxons v Celts) 3 match series is the way forward. Performance in this series should be used to select a GREAT BRITAIN squad to take on Four Nations and tours, leaving the Home Nations to have end of season tournaments or tours and play every four years in the World Cup. And if crowds are low initially - DON'T GIVE UP! Don't forget a lot of people thought Origin would never work.
Fundamentally when our players are put in the high pressure Test arena they crumble - look at all the soft spilt ball in the Four Nations this year.
Most if not all NRL games have to be played with a high level of intensity. This is certainly not the case in Super League (and I should know, I'm a Quins season ticket holder!) Going from 12 to 14 teams was a big mistake in this regard - we should be down to 10 and increasing the professionalism of the Championship rather than stretching Super League beyond its means and starving good Championship clubs of money and players.

The simple fact of the matter is that there's not enough money in the game to fund resources to the same extent as they do in Australia.

I remember in the 90s when we had a 3 division league, just before SL started. 2nd div had just 8 teams, to build the intensity needed for the step up..


It failed utterly. So the "fewer teams, more intensity" is crap. Look at the SPL. What really happens is two teams walk it by miles, followed by the make weights.


And just to stir it a bit more, the last time we beat the Aussies, we had no P&R and we had just one league that all teams played in.

Does anyone else think that our players freeze on big occasions? I think that the u21 and academy teams would benefit if they played in front of bigger crowds, so maybe it would be good if Englands youngsters played warm ups to big games like Wigan v Saints, Leeds-Bradford, the Hull derby etc.

before everyone throws the baby out with the bathwater.....lets just remember that this was probably our 3rd choice team that we sent down under.......and they only lost by 10 to the world champions and australia could only score 18 legitimate points against us..to our 14point.....

its not all bad imo.....what do we need to do to improve??

1, a 2 game series against the Other nationalities...and have a England 'A' team play france & wales

2, send the whole of the england academy team to the NRL clubs to play in their NYC

3, sack McNamara......taking burgess & graham off after just 20mins while leading 8-6....when they came back on it was 26-8.....erm.....pack ya bags ya clown...

Really?

There were probably four players missing who would have been dead set selections for England's first choice 17 had they been available - Peacock, Morley, Eastmond and maybe Hall.

Hardly a third choice line up.

Hall was available, he just wasnt selected.

Well, where do we start...

The RFL have to start taking the international scene more seriously
More players need to go out to Oz and learn from the best
Sack Steve Mac and replace him with a decent f'in coach and backroom staff who can pick a decent squad. The guy got released/fired by Bradford yet we give him the England job? Absolute genius move.
Reduce the overseas quota to 3 so only the very best imports come over

This one's a bit drastic but how about...
Scrap the 4 nations and go back to Great Britain with an Ashes test series every 4 years and a Kiwi series every two. Switching to an England team has basically crippled our chances of winning any international competitions because the strength in depth simply isn't there...

Fund jnr RL to the tune of 20million pounds a year, double the number of jnrs playing RL in England, increase revenue at SL clubs to 8million pounds. Then we would be where Australia are at today. Your living in cloud cuckoo land. RL in Australia has become massive, the game in England is simply not big enough to keep pace. In fact given the disaprity in money in the two leagues it is amazing we are anywhere near them.

but it will still be the same 17 englishmen whether we're england or GB

Hmmm... Some good points there.

doesnt mean they are 'good' academies. We have clubs who simply pay lip service to junior development, clubs with very strong amateur areas who bring through few youngsters, and those that do rarely fulfil their potential, ill come back to this in a short while.

The argument about needing a comparable series to origin is nonsense, the Aussies arent better because they play 3 origin games a year. It also forgets that the Kiwis have nothing like it and they do alright.

We have four problems to overcome,

firstly, Coaching. we dont have coaches of the same quality, we need to make them, we need to innovating not playing catch up. Also just the effort we put into coaching the basics. It is criminal that Warrington couldnt coach Kevin Penny how to catch. There is debate on the leeds board about whether Kallum Watkins will 'make it' there shouldnt be, he has all the natural attributes to make a world class player, it should be a given we can coach him defensive position and decision making.

secondly Sports science, the game barely touches the surface of player preparation and athletic improvement. Here is an opportunity for us to invest and be at the forefront of an area which will help us close the gap with the players we have right now, we need to be doing this not only at international level but at club level.

thirdly Player pool. It is too small. We need to clubs to be unearthing every potential player possible, looking at every sprinter, every wrestler, weightlifter, basketball player, etc, It is very rare that an athlete can make a career out of these sports, and rarer still that they can make a living out of it in the way they can at RL. We also need more clubs, in more areas, not just at SL level but at NL level and Amateur level because we need more players. Every county level athletics meet should over-flowing with RL scouts. Then we can use our superior Coaching and Sports Science to make them RL players.

lastly mentality. We have got a mental hurdle to overcome before we can win. This should be easy to change, but its something that we shouldnt really have allowed ourselves to develop. I would like to see an under 16's, U18's, and U21's go to Australia every year for a 3 month tour, playing and learning how to beat, and then experiencing beating Australian club and respective national sides. So that when they move up to the full-squad they know what its like to win regularly against Australian players.

We are playing catch up, and we need to stop simply doing a poor impression of Australia and start innovating ourselves and put in place a structure where clubs are not only forced to do the minimum in terms of creating quality RL players, but rewarded for doing so.

You keep hitting on this one Smokey, as if there is a massive pool of top level athletes in these other sports, that aren't playing rugby at all so can't be found.
The guys playing these sports, if they have an aptitude for rugby, are almost certainly playing it.
As an example, of the players we've recently got into pro academies or trials, along with playing rugby, we had players who also did: Hockey, Athletics (200m sprinter) , trampolining, power lifting, and judo.
They were all spotted because of playing rugby, not those other sports. I don't believe there is this pool out there of kids playing other sports and never thinking of rugby, who are going to be superior athletes.

Spot on and this is what I was trying to get at in my opening post. There is so much that the clubs, and the RFL, can do now to narrow the gap. Things like getting rid of qouta players or calling for more representative games only play lip service to the problem and in my opinion will not solve anything in themselves. They do not get rid of the fundamental flaws in the way that the game is run in the country from amateur level to many professional clubs. Expanding our player pool is great but will take time, money and effort and in the meantime I firmly believe that there is an awful lot that can be done to make our existing player poor better.

I dont believe they are playing RL. In fact, I have no idea why they would be right now. People in large swathes of the country barely acknowledge RL's existance, why would we expect that they are actually going out and trying it.

You go even to somewhere as close as Liverpool or Manchester and RL merits barely a mention, these places are full of athletes who could be suited to our game, or have a base athletic ability we should be able to develop in to something, but if they have never heard of the game, or dont really know anything about it what are the chances that firstly they are going to go out and try and secondly that their raw talent would be identified?

Our biggest problem is in the factors mentioned by famous above particularly coaching and development work. Reducing the number of overseas players isn't suddenly going to make any of those things better.

I never said they were playing RL



If you're in Manchester or Liverpool, it's likely they're playing a different sport that seems quite willing to throw money at athletes who wouldn't even make decent amateurs in most other sports.

it will however force clubs to rely on their own coaching and development rather than the NRLs. Which should force the clubs to improve in these aspects if they want to be successful.

Well then if you are talking about them playing RU (which I also dont believe attracts athletes at anywhere near the level it could with a targeted talent identification programme) then there a amateurs in RU who could make the grade in RL. Similarly there are Amateurs in RL who could make the grade in RL.

Keith Senior was playing for Hudds YMCA before being picked up by Sheffield. Mike Coady was an RU player of no-note who didnt play RL until he was 18, and then at a fairly low level.

I dont think it is a particularly efficient way of getting top class athletes in to the game, by leaving them with their sport in the hope RU picks them up, then we pick them up later.

If you are talking about football, then the number of players who make a career out of it is miniscule, because of the sheer number of players it is only the very very best who make any sort of career out of it. At 15/16/18/20 there are huge amounts of top quality athletes who are cast out from football, there is nothing wrong with offering them alternatives. But that gets away from the point because we cant compete with football.

We can compete with Sprinting, wrestling, basketball, and RU, and there should be no reason we dont. With the correct coaching from 15/16/17/18/19/20 we can make players out of people who posses the basic qualities needed to be involved in these sports at any kind of level.

It's not RU/RL picking them up. It's them picking RU/RL. If they have the aptitude for the sport, then 95% or more of them will pick it. There just aren't a quantity of RL suited players hanging about in sprinting/wrestling and basketball that aren't playing any form of rugby just waiting to be picked up, that aren't picked up by current scouting of RL and RU and trials programmes.

As to making a career in soccer, well I live in a village of 4000 people, the local soccer clubs pays it's players and coaching staff. The nearby town of 22000 people has several clubs that pay their players. And this is a rugby county with little interest in soccer.

The RFL need to decide if they want england to compete on the international stage or if the standard of super league is more important.

If we decide to put england first then super league may well suffer for a good few years as changes to player imports, number of teams and salary cap changes.

IMO i'd like to see:

Super league reduced to 12 teams
Imports reduced to 3 ( only 3 in total, none of this fed trained, aussies with english grandad rubbish)
All yougsters brought thru the club from a early age should have a reduction against the salary cap.

The big change for me would be having home grown players that have come thru the ranks at club level having reduction on the salary cap. To many young players are cut from super league squads due to the salary cap. God knows how much talent we are losing due to clubs striving to get under the cap.