fail to see what time I post and from where adds any credence to your beliefs? I stand by my statement that it is perfectly acceptable for a national paper with a readership based mainly in the SE of England not to mention the RLWC in its round up. This has now been backed up with a post from Australia that states the RLWC got 1 passing mention in many reviews of 2013 there....and we all know how MASSIVE RL is in 'stralia.


Yeah....I crave your attention



Fact is the indignation in the OP at the omission of RL from the Guardians top 10 was misplaced hyperbole and has now been replaced with a little troll hunting. It is a sad indictment that self confessed hunters like you feel the need to invade every thread with name calling. You will notice I didn't mention union first, I simply highlighted a flawed stand point and then as usual the name calling starts.

I do fear for the educational standards in the UK when debating abilities fall this far

So you admit the media is Southern England biased towards RU and against RL? And there was me thinking you blamed the rfl for all the games problems!

1. I do not believe there is any media bias against RL other than in your and a few others heads. I'll type it slowly for you......the Guardian Readership have little if any interest in Rugby League so I leave it to the Editorial staff at that paper as to what they print. DEMAND = SUPPLY......if the readership wanted it, they'd get it.
2. I blame a lot of people and organisations for the woes of RL in the UK. The RFL happen to be one of the main protagonists in the farcical handling of the sport in recent years, but they are not alone, as I also believe the SL clubs are guilty of underselling themselves as well as a lot of self serving decision making whilst I believe the championship clubs are not without blame either.
3. The OP posted here with indignation that a paper mainly read by tree hugging, bark licking, dolphin kissing aspirant middle class s didn't include a RL moment that he/she thought should have been included. The real surprise is he/she expected anything else



Once again, the voice of the minority, even when they are actually a tiny minority and have been out represented and outvoted in a perfectly legal way, can only be heard through the protest of those few....can I suggest you and the OP dress up as batman & robin and scale the walls of Buckingham Palace? Maybe then RL will get the headlines you believe it deserves!

Crikey, you really do think a lot of yourself don't you.



I wasn't looking to get into any debate with you, you're a troll who 99.9% of the time just spouts the same recycled crap to anyone who'll listen and anyone unlike yourself who obviously has very little going on in his life (proven by the fact you couldn't wait to get on RLFans at 9am on New Years Day FFS) i've got lots to keep me busy. The day i spend hours on here plaiting fog with the likes of you is the day i give up on life.

Yep. I am bigger than Elvis, The Beatles and Jesus all rolled into one.....I'm almost as big as SBW!

What the hell that has to do with my comments regarding the rights of a national paper to ignore RL I am unsure, but I am sure it made you feel clever saying it, eh?

..no, you were instead attempting to look clever by pointing out what time of the day it was that I posted. You still haven't managed to get the correct timeby the way!


Again, no attempt to answer the topic under discussion, just more baited bollox and insults. BTW, I am not sure how you access the web, but I do so through tablet, phone and laptop, which means your sad image of gutterfax typing away at his computer at 9pm/9am (it was actually 10am here BTW) are wide of the mark....I was a passenger in a car the way to the golf course at the time.



No...you simply pop in now and again to post in threads I am in to crack "un-"wise comments and fail miserably in any attempt to engage in debate.

Hey, if in your insular little world you believe that RL demands coverage in the nationals, then good for you. I'll stick to the reality where RL commands little attention from both the media and the British public because it is run by people with narrow minds and even narrower abilities.....people with your kind of attitude really. It's sad!

Wasn't the attendance at Wembley some 20,000 more than that in Dublin.? Is the Guardian an English newspaper ? If it's readership is mostly in the South, isn't it true that Wembley is in the South and so the Guardian should have mentioned this game ? With, at the time, both the NZ RU team and the NZ RL team being world champions and with both pulling off miracle escapes from defeat, one of which was against and English national team before a huge crowd in the south in England, don't you think both games should have warranted a mention with the game against a non English team, in a foreign country the least worthy of mention in an ENGLISH newspaper.

The newspaper will print what it wants and in general what it believes it's readers want to read. Their failure to place a RL moment in their top 10 of the year is hardly going to alienate its readership and therefore as far as they are concerned is not a hanging offence that some narrow minded fans of a minority sport would have you believe. There were no spare seats in Dublin by the way whilst 2 games left close to 30% unsold seats......and events in Dublin Drew a bigger BBC audience......but shame on the guardian for not pandering to the desires of people who don't read it.
Fuck me........only RL fans would complain about lack if RL coverage in a paper they DON'T read

where are you getting the bbc viewing stats from?

The bias from the southern based media is there as you have admitted, wether it is due to perceived readership interest, old school RU tie connections of editors or some other reasoning the bias is very clear and obvious to anyone other than a Union troll.

Could someone provide some factual examples of old school RU connections of current national newspaper editors. I would be very interested to see those....

Wether there is bias or not, and whatever that reason is or isnt, there isnt any benifit using it as an excuse for bad management, what difference would it make to RL if they had included the WC match in the list ?

Absolutely nothing

Start filling stadiums,build a truly national competition with a strong competitive spread, start winning International competitions against the Aussies and then you would have complaints

I'm guessing the editor of the Guardian didn't get exposed to League in his education years lol!

was educated at Lanesborough Prep School, Guildford, where he was also a chorister at Christ Church, and Cranleigh School, a boys' independent school in Cranleigh, Surrey. At Magdalene College, Cambridge, he read English Literature.

Scott Moss Guardian sports writer:
"I grew up with rugby, and loved the way the game defined Newport"

Not surprising, but also irrelivant

Oh for Gods sake, even you don't believe that rubbish. England lost to New Zealand, in a competitive match. The Union game was Ireland. A passing interest in a friendly game from however many people does not equate... Italy v Ireland? Deary me, must try harder, chomp chomp - yawn.

One state? Riiight. Even the Aussie Rules trolls would give us 2... OK, I'll give Victoria and WA to the AFL any day, but the idea that Union is ahead of League in ANY state of Australia AT ALL is a joke. Your beloved game is dying here - certainly by the benchmarks you set RL in the UK - and I've really enjoyed watching it since I arrived. Like I said, you can't help yourself on the Black is White stuff like that, which is why nobody even hears the rare valid points you make any more.

At least Dutoni had a sense of humour back in the day mate...

Very relevant. Believe me, as a lad who moved south at 13 and experienced the institutionalised League hatred in even state Union-playing schools (honestly, you couldn't make some of the crap I saw up) let alone the private ones, this stuff sticks and will take at least another generation to wash out amongst southern-educated professionals, be they journalists, sponsors or whoever of influence.

Seriously



The Guardian will write what its readers want and no amount of whining is going to change that.

Oh, and Nelson, the whites rule South Africa, nothing's going to change that.

And Gorbachev, the Berlin Wall's here to stay too. Nothing's going to change that either.

It was the majority that changed those things, if you can convince the majority, change away

seriously













Oh sorry, I thought you were Joking

The Guardian lost is way years ago - it now panders to the not too intelligent, trustafarian, public school set. It's a crap paper. I couldn't care less what such an unrepresentative rag feels is important.

spot on

...let them write what they want, they've only 199,000 readers anyway!
Here's your Guardian readership...

Again, where did you get your BBC Tv audience stats from?

As for Union being bigger than League, yeh except for:
NSW
Victoria
Qland
NT
Yorkshire
Lancashire
Cheshire
Merseyside
PNG etc etc etc

How are the S15 players coping with their pay cuts this year lol? Has S15 audience managed to get bigger that the NRL's U20's kid games yet? lol
Bring on NRL expansion when we will see RL in WA bury RU again and hopefully another NZ team to build on the RL momentum of recent years in kiwi land.

Whatever matey, it's my life and I lived it. The rugby-playing state school I went to down south even banned "soccer" (as they called it) for Gods sake, you couldn't even bring your own ball in, so imagine the reaction to a lad organising some scratch League games? It wasn't the only school with that attitude. Don't underestimate the ongoing resonance of that sort of behaviour on certain segments of the population, and knock on to how our sport is treated in the media. It's how the real world works.

That's why the greater development of student RL should be a priority for the RFL, we need to get more future influencers on board. Some people's beliefs are more important than others, even if your reductionist viewpoint sees all numbers as equal and all decisions as rationally made.

(I notice you ignored my call out of your nonsense on Australia mind...)

same twitter source that was used during the RLWC....the final was out drawn by Wales v Australia too.....


Both sports are minority sports in
Victoria
NT
Yorkshire
Lancashire
Cheshire
Merseyside
PNG etc etc etc

hope that clears that up for you

but let's see if Union gets more than 8,000 for its games in the north in 2015...




How does a UK papers failure to recognise a game between England and New Zealand in its top 10 get to a debate about S15 in Australia? I take it you were ignoring South Africa and New Zealand to suit your agenda by the way....




where has RL buried Union in Australia?

Yep..we'll fill the Westpac in March but get ignored again in favour of Brisbane 2...

all of which is a cool story bro, but has little to do with a daily paper with less than 200k readers, most of whom are middle class aspirant bleeding heart liberals who want to be seen as left wing, not counting a single moment of RL in their annual sports review top 10.
we all know how uber dominant RL is in Australia, yet the RLWC got a cursory mention there.....yet the Guardian gets its own thread here

It has everything to do with it. The obvious point is that there is an ingrained, institutionalised bias against RL in th UK printed media as a direct result of 100 years of cultural suppression in the places where influencers are developed and influence is wielded. That wil change over time because those issues are no longer in play to the same extent in schools and universities, and as the internet disintermediates media - but as things stand the effects are still there for all to see.

Your reductionist, rationalist view of "papers print what people wan to read" ignores those cultural factors. If that we're true I'd counter with why did Union club games used to get more coverage when watched by one man and his dog and why did Union have a weekly national magazine TV programme on the Beeb which televised the same games? Sometimes supply creates demand, not the other way around.