Just got back from Carfest at Oulton Park, Cheshire where I saw the difference between RL & RFU yet again. In amongst the food stalls, cars and music was a three stand promotional display containing 2 kids events plus a stall selling FRU merchandised all professionally presented and organised. Did we see a similar display promoting RL - NO! RFU = crap game run professionally whereas RL = great game run by baffoons. This, plus the over complicated structure, is another reason why RL will be dead on its knees in 10years, completely overshadowed by RU & NRL. Something must be done now to force the existing management out and replaced by professional business people with strategic vision.

Just one thing stops RL doing that.......Money..

they have been saying Rl is going to be dead for decades uyet here it is, RU needs it as its a crap game.

Over £3 million profit from the World Cup - some of that should be used to promote the game further.

Cr@p game that yet attracts money, blue chip sponsors and 80,000 fans per England international.



The above doesn't seem to really make sense? The parts about blue chip companies, money and high attendance's is all FACT so i wonder which part is the BS?

I dont know, which part was called BS?

Seems obvious to me. The game can't be as bad as some on here make out if it brings in everything that i mentioned.

Maybe it's just the RL blinkers that come have

the game is awful, its just bred into people, was always a professional sport just the toffs used to use their influence to give jobs that didnt exist and they always had good sponsors. We are still going strong too.

So the only way people like RU is if they've had it bred into them.



Ever thought that people might actually watch it or invest in it because they like the game?

Not a hard choice for blue chip companies. On the one side you have a international game with a strong european club game and on the other side you have SL and it's so called 'characters' like Eddie & Stevo.

how can a game be enjoyable to watch when the ball is out of play 40% of the time....

The same can be said for football but they seem to do alright as well.

can you? The 40% is ana ctual stat for RU, I douby football is due to the quick restart.

ooooh the occasional arrogance of some people on here.
I prefer RL to RU, but I am not so up my own that I do not accept that other people may prefer RU to RL.

Guess what - there are some things that RU offers that we do not. Scrums and Line-outs offer a different dimension that we dont have, having unlimited tackles can make the game very fluid. And the different technical aspects of each of the disciplines means that you get a variety of players from small fast halves to wide props to bean pole locks.

only when we brush the chips off our shoulders and learn to look at our game with neutral eyes will we improve.
We have to start a debate by forgetting whether we have a 'better' game than RU, but we have to make our own game the best it can be regardless.

As the OP has suggested we also have to learn from others where they can provide examples of how to do things better.

This could start by not seeing some tenuous way to have a dig at the RFL on a day out and running back home to jump on the internet and post your opinion to have it validated by other miserable RL fans.

In all seriousness, we really to need to shift the chip off our collective shoulder before our sport can fully reach it's potential.

Perhaps because you are watching through RL coloured spectacles!

Seriously I am no fan of RU but if you are brought up watching it then you probably appreciate it with all it's tactical nuances etc and RL would appear to be the strange game.

Think RL would struggle at Oulton park though -firmly in RU lands!

Seriously though RL does struggle on the publicity side of things, RU has always had a much slicker publicity department (and probably a higher profile amongst the more serious press and TV to be honest - we get stuck with the cloth cap / parochial commentators and pundits). Add in RFLs tendency to shoot itself in the foot quite frequently it is always an uphill struggle.

Yet at grassroots/club level a lot of good stuff does go on - what the RFL needs is a serious shakeup in the publicity department and to spend some money otherwise it will always be a minority sport in this country.

Always comes down to the £££s. They've got RBS behind them, we've got Foxy fecking Bingo...

Im not up my own booty, did you read what I said? the game has the ball in play for 60% of the time...thats a joke. The basic skill set is poor also, half cant pass hit a gap and are poor defensivley. Thats bread and butter rugby in either code but they get away with it cos they can scrummage or jump up in a line out, thurst me I played both. Was never knackered after a game of RU and the season out RL team shifted over to RU we never lost with a full team out.

My lad went to a 3-day RFU training camp last week, at Sale Sharks training facility. it was run by Sales own junior team coaches which included former England six nations winning players. The coaching was professional and concentrated on skills, less on holiday fun, and the facilities were outstanding, beautiful pitches, new buildings & gymnasium. Compared to what you get offered at Wigan Warriors junior camps, run by bits of kids who I've never heard of, in an old school.

It really opened my eyes to the gap between the codes, there's some serious money in the other code- we are missing something somewhere.

That's because a figure like £3m profit from the RLWC is chickenfeed compared to what the RUWC will bring in (not to mention the 6N every year - £3m won't go a long way at all...

One of the reasons RU is the way is it is, is that it's got the "establishment" behind it. It came about (urban myth or not) in a public school in Rugby, is promoted above the "thuggish" soccer in the majority of existing public schools that coincidentally provide most of the movers & shakers in the current government & blue-chip companies in the land (if not the Commonwealth).

If anyone bothered to watch the 7s last weekend in Glasgow, you'd realise that they've got a very addictive format there that cannot fail to enthuse kids & will often lead to further interest in the 15s game. RL 9s was "demonstrated" before the games actually kicked off, but has anyone on here actually read or seen anything about it since?

Premiership RU is dire unless you subscribe to the "chess on grass" theory, in which case good luck to you. However, some of the games in the Celtic leagues (BBC2 Wales/Scotland/NI on a Friday night in the winter for anyone with FreeSat - I assume it's available on Sly too) are quite entertaining as they tend to run the ball instead of playing ping-pong & hoofing it up the field every five seconds.

The image of RL is still that of a bunch of fat blokes running around in a muddy field watched by two blokes in flat caps with a whippet or a ferret on a piece of string. I have this argument every time I have to visit any of our offices in London or (for my sins) Milton Keynes. The bigoted attitude of RU stalwarts who've never bothered to watch a league game is mind-boggling & akin to arguing that God doesn't exist with a Jehovah's Witness.

It's not that League is any better a game than Union or vice-versa: there will always be idiots who slag off one or the other without any evidence or first-hand knowledge.

The problem (one of them) is that we have a governing body that routinely sticks its head in the sand when confronted by their ineptitude to capitalise on events that should be a given. It's plain that the hype & interest generated by the WC last year has been squandered & we're back to squabbling about whether the new format is going to work (I think it will, so long as there's a concerted effort to get the lower leagues full-time & get some cash to them), and there are too many vested interests in Red Hall for truly effective governance.

Until we get rid of the cloth-cap & ferret image (actively, if covertly, promoted by Twickenham) & someone other than Andy Burnham takes up the call to arms, League is destined to be forever the "Northern League" - you could argue, we'd do worse than revert to the old name & stop trying to be something we can never be.

Excellent well sided post.

The 'blinkers' some RL fans have when it comes to the other code is laughable. The quote before than no RU players can tackle or pass is just laughable. The fact there's loads of RU players out there who would grace league, much like they did in the past, isn't something that those with a chip on their shoulder want to hear.

So, going back to my original post, which was prompted by the professional way in which England RU were promoting their game in a non- RU heartland, what do we do to change the existing RL hierarchy and replace it by professional business people with strategic vision??

Sadly there's nothing anyone can do.

Look at the efforts of IL recently and you soon realise the power lies with those unwilling to make the serious and tough decisions needed.

The 'elite' of RL hold all the cards and it would take a political mastermind to wrestle anything away from them . I'd personally like to see the Wigan club flirt with the RU power brokers and threaten a defection. Make some noise about the greatest RL club thinking of moving to the Aviva Premiership and see how the cards fall after.

who are the elite if it doesn't include Wigan?! - good idea though, maybe the 6 clubs which voted against the new structure should threaten a break away league backed by another TV channel

Sorry by elite I mean the governing body. The people that IL criticised over thier running of the game at the start of this season.