My apologies, I neglected to hang on your every word.

The problem with this is it limits the ticket buying public to people already in London and those prepared to book a hotel for the night before.

Reading some of these responses you'd think a sports competition having self-interest was the world's greatest sin.

State of Origin would be massive. It's the one rugby league event that people in the UK who don't even like or know much about rugby league will watch, despite some of the drivel posted in this thread suggesting otherwise. I'd go as far as saying that outside of world cups it probably draws more interest from casual sports fans than some international games do.

If international rugby league is truly the way forward and there is a market for it then where is the conflict here? From the sounds of some of you, Dunbar for example, you talk up internationals but sound petrified that origin would take attention away from them. If the UK care about international games and not origin then what are you worried about? If it's a failure then it's a failure for the NRL. So what. Stop whinging.

On a Wednesday morning. Put the SL grand final or rugby league world cup final on Sky on a wednesday morning and lets see how much better it rates.

You think Aus - NZ would have rated much better at 11am middle of the week when most the country are at work?

i would schedule the second game of the series in london - there will be something riding on it (and to be fair even after a 2 - 0 series lead the 3rd game would stilll mean something), but the chance for one of the teams to pull level or go and take the series would set it up nicely. also there may be some juicy hype arising out of game 1 that could be used to market it - even though i think it would be close to a sell out anyway.

SOO is always a bit imbalanced by having 2 games in either queensland or nsw - a game on neutral soil would balance it up

Most people I talk to that don't have much knowledge or interest in rugby league don't have a clue about State of Origin. They have no idea what it is.
They don't need to know anything about rugby league to back England against Australia or New Zealand.

Mine was a valid point.....the SL GF only drew 260k this year......you'll get maybe double that on SKY or possibly 1 million on BBC......SoO is a big thing to RL fans....it really is an irrelevance outside of that in regards of UK sports consciousness outside of RL fans.......

btw.......SoO is a Wednesday event........it's part of a 1 billion dollar TV deal in which the TV companies dictate KO times and dates........SoO rates better than either NRL or AFL grand finals because it is on a Wednesday........do you think Channel 9 are going to drop close to 1 million viewers to accommodate an experiment? Do you think NRL coaches will welcome the 2 weeks their stars will be missing for the sake of 1 game?

I don’t think anyone thinks SoO wouldn’t sell well but it isn’t our competition and doesn’t benefit our competition. It wont attract new fans, it wont attract lapsed fans to our competition, it wont make us any money. It doesn’t benefit our game over here in any way.

It simply takes attention away from our game and cements our position as number 2.
I can see the point of origin being used to spread the game, but South Africa would be the obvious place to try that, not the games heartland.

I have just asked the 8 people I work with, Do you know what state of origin is & would you watch it? Not very scientific but interesting. Only two know of it, one because her dad is a league fan the other is an Aussie from Melbourne & neither would go near rugby in any form. The other six had not heard of it & don't watch much sport of any kind & have never been to a live sports match of any kind except one who went to F1 once.
I have no doubt there may be enough to fill Wembley but would you get a TV audiance? I think we suffer on this forum by assuming every one else would be as crazy about the game as we are if we could get them through the gate to a game. As said before if the NRL clubs want to promote league great, but the dont they want to promote the NRL & for the simple disrespect they show our game in the UK they can clear off for me.

Gutters









......why do you find it so difficult...to post without......ellipsis?

I would love to go to Origin at wembley, as for suggestions for sending it elsewhere one of the reasons Wembley is suggested is the corporate hospitality and the reason the champions league final will be there every other year in the near future.

anybody who feels that the greatest rugby series, of either codes doesn't warrant a game at Wembley needs their head banging! the publicity the game will bring for the sport would be 10xs more than it would get normally!

nfl is not played world wide, probably played in less countries than league but it still doesn't stop neutrals from going and selling out Wembley for the occaision and the media hype around it goes into overdrive!

Seeing as though you have named me, I will address a couple of your points

Firstly, I think you significantly overestimate the awareness of State of Origin outside of Rugby League fans. We know all about it and we all look forward to the series every year but my question is why would a non-Rugby League fan have an awareness of an interstate competition on the other side of the world?

I am not petrified that Origin would take attention away from Internationals but I am concerned that it is not the right focus. Let’s take the recent World Cup match in Bristol as an example. It was a huge success with a crowd that far outstripped what most expected. This was primarily down to great work from people raising awareness of the event. As Rugby League fans, we know that the USA vs. Cook Islands would not be the best standard RL but I believe it would have been far easier to sell that game to the Bristol and South West public than NSW vs. Queensland would have been. Despite the fact we know that the SOO would be a wonderful game, the promotion was about the occasion and not the quality of the game

I am not in any way against the concept of a SOO game at Wembley and if it went ahead I would want it to be a huge success and, as I have said before, I would be there. But fundamentally, it is not the correct way to raise the profile of our sport. Despite the quality of the game, showcasing an Australian inter-state match as the pinnacle of our sport is actually quite a negative message

Anyway, this is my opinion and you may disagree. But, I would appreciate it if you didn’t categorises my passion for growing our game in the right way as whinging. Thanks

I can't see this happening, for some of the logistical reasons already stated. I'd probably go if it did happen, though. Just a thought (apologies if this has already been mentioned and I've missed it): if a SOO game was played over here you'd have the whole Aussie squad in the UK. Scheduling a mid-season England v Aus test for the following weekend might get more value out of the trip. You could even make it a double header with England Knights v Australia A.

why are rugby league fans obsessed with making everything a double header

If its good enough for the yanks and the NFL.

I'd go for sure.

I think you'd get a lot of RU fans turning up as well...to see what all the fuss is about.

Can you imagine how good it would be to hear Dave Woods calling State of Origin on the BBC?

But would the BBC be interested?

Me and atleast 10 mates would be at the game if it was anounced for tomorrow morning, those saying it would only attract 60,000 are mental. Priced right ( and I dont mean mega cheap) and with enough marketing time, Wembley would 100% be a sell out for Origin. Hope this goes ahead.

This ^^^^
I'm on a ship off the Norwegian coast and was just thinking about chucking myself overboard reading all the comments from people creaming themselves at the prospect of SOO at Wembley. Thanks Beverley red you might have just saved my life!

I'd be off

. Would love this to go ahead

And yet even Jeremy Guscott has been bigging up the State of Origin in the media recently.
I'm pretty sure a lot of people would be interested outside the core fans of the game

.....providing we tell them about it! That's where we go wrong.

I reckon you'd get 20k Aussies there for a start.

ok so we go out, tell everyone about, bang on about brilliant marketing, wonderful adverts, a flawless build up that would have made a Don Draper/Martin Sorrell transformeresq super-advertiser jealous, 90k people go an pay £50 a ticket to go see SoO. The NRL/ARL take the £4.5m it makes in ticket revenue, pay the costs and take the profit.

Then what?

Wheres the benefit for the game over here?

Fact is that yes, we probably could sell out SoO, and yest it probably would get a slightly different fanbase to attend. But the uncomfortable end conclusion is that we would have spent a whole lot of time and effort seeing the publicity, prestige and goodwill sucked out of our domestic game and thrown away on a gimmick game between two states containing players who play 11k miles away, so a rival competition can make money.

It is a fairly forlorn hope that the magic dust from a game between two states 11k miles away will attract fans to a different competition 200miles

I hope it is one of the three games rather than just adding a 4th game like what they did in 1987 in america

I WANT TO BUY MY SOO TICKETS AND I WANT THEM NOW

It's not politically correct but the answer to that question is simple - It's the violence. Rugby league fans like to underestimate it in this push to attract families to the game but you can't dispute that plenty of red blooded males would sit down to watch a sports game if you could guarantee a brawl and ferocious big hits.

Lots of sports fans who know about Origin have time for it for that reason. Are people who don't know about State of Origin as a series going to bat an eyelid? Probably not. But it would be foolish to underestimate the positive opinions on origin from non-league fans who're aware of it - and I'd argue there's a surprising number who are. You can search the internet and find testimonies all over the place from non-league people who love origin and buy into it as a concept.

I'm actually surprised at the number of people who are saying otherwise, genuinely. I'm not in a league hotbed and I know so many people who're aware of origin and are happy to watch it. Might not say much about my friends, ha.



I disagree. I think that's shortsighted of you. If the Australians did go for this and if it did work then it would be further proof that origin as a concept is big enough to warrant standalone weekends. If origin is ever moved to standalone weekends - and it should be - then that opens up a world of possibilities for the international game, as tests can be scheduled to run alongside the series.



Then sell it as the pinnacle of Australian sport. There's no point splitting hairs over whether it is or isn't the pinnacle of the sport.

If we're talking about negative messages, you know, isn't implying that international league is so fragile that a one-off origin game would send out the wrong message and harm the games standing just that - a negative message to send out?

I don't see the conflict, personally, in saying that origin is the greatest domestic rugby series in the world - one of the best in all of sport, in fact - and is right up there with internationals as far as intensity and skill is concerned.

To say 'Oh we shouldn't really have origin here because it sends the wrong message and undermines the international game and sends out a negative message' hardly paints a positive picture of the sport.



My apologies.