Dave T

There are only so many times you can use the standard colours and traditional designs really, I quite like the training approach that sports clubs use of more garish designs and different colours. The England RL site has some standard red, white and blue tees, and while they are perfectly fine, they are a bit meh and a bit old fashioned imo. The new range is more in line with what I'd expect to see nowadays, and other sports do have quite similar designs, suggesting it's a trend thing. Whilst I'm a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to kits in always preferring the home colours, if we think about football for example, there are so many iconic away shirts at England level and at clubs. I'm OK with them being a bit out there, particularly as they also cater for those who believe the England tees should be red, blue or white.

I suppose they have tickets out with groups and partners, plus the women's teams and 1895 cup teams. It isn't just split three ways.

Aye, see my response to Chris, only had one item which was very good, haven't had tees, so fair enough on the quality of them, I can't really comment.

Tbh, the only thing I've ever had was a hoodie which was pretty nice quality, certqinly up there with previous ones ive had from Wire like O'Neills, Canterbury and Puma. So I can't comment on the training gear, so fair comment if it's pants.

Yeah, they are, great value those

I'm just not seeing too much wrong with it tbh. I've had a quick look at Union and Football training ranges and none of it offers any more. I find the range a touch flat personally, I like the more garish stuff for training tees. The Kangaroos effort is lacking massively, indicative of their international efforts I'd say.

The slow-motion clips are actually pretty impressive on a technical level, if you were going to do a video about the dangers of head contact in RL though, the double impact is probably as good a demonstration as anything you can find.

Yeah i set it up in 2 mins earlier as a way of sharing pics on here without using a personal account since the site has gone to pot with uploads. You seem to have an issue with anyin3 disagreeing with you, as I said earlier, I'll leave you to it.

To be fair on pricing, the RFL have flipped it substantially for the Cup Final. I found an old seating plan for the 2009 Final and the cheapest tickets were behind the sticks upper tier then lower tier were the 2nd cheapest. It was 2nd most expensive on halfway top tier. By flipping the lower tier to higher pricing, they have been smarter in knowing that the hard-core will happily pay a fair bit more and rush for those seats. The upper tier isn't great and they are the cheaper seats. So i think they've been smarter in pricing points, what they haven't done is grow the actual demand.

Moving on to higher quality video! Clear head contact on both angles imo.

Yup, the 2nd choice put in a superb performance!

Tbh, the slow motion replay in HD clearly shows head contact with shoulder. I'm perfectly happy to acknowledge two areas of mitigation - reduction in height, and secondary contact. But neither of those things cancel out something being a penalty, they just move it down from being a card really.

Interesting to compare to the NRL Kangaroos shop: Australian Kangaroos Merchandise – NRL Shop

England Rugby League Training Wear - Elite Pro Sports Look at the whole range of training wear - I'm not really sure what people's issue is. Loads of red, blue and white t shirts that are in a similar mould to those on the Australia and New Zealand pages (and more choice) and then the new range is different, not unlike some on the England RU site (I won't link to that!). People will celebrate this: AUSTRALIAN KANGAROOS - YOUTH RETAIL TRAINING TEE GRN - Elite Pro Sports But then moan about this: England RL Chest Panel Tee Red - Elite Pro Sports

Is this the first year we have gone fully digital? I think it may have been last year when I made a comment about how archaic it was having people queuing at turnstyles and ticket windows to buy tickets.

Illegal: Legal: A player being low does not make head contact legal.

I think we agree on the initial point of contact to be honest. I think it is at the top of the shoulder. Same with the shoulder charge one, it is shoulder. But that goes to my point about initial point of contact isn't the only thing we look at - we penalise where a player hits the ball/shoulder and then goes up into the face. On the line in bold, I can absolutely buy that and understand your position on it. I don't fully agree, because I think changing height is a natural part of the game and players like Rob Burrow and Jason Robinson for example shouldn't have to just cop high shots because of that. Where I do think the lowering of the ball carrier comes into it is around the punishment. Tai's tackle was deemed a foul, but the mitigant was how low the ball carrier was. Other contact with the head is being deemed legal because the ball carrier was lower. That is inconsistent.

Grab 3 clearly shows Thewlis' face in Trout's shoulder. I'm not sure what you mean by his head being about the tackler's shoulder. For clarity, the bright white bit is Trout's back. I think there is a fair opinion that that Thewlis' head fires forward after initial contact into Trout's shoulder, but that does come back to the fact that that can only really happen if the tackle is high on the body and therefore high risk. Heads move on contact, we all know that. I'm not going to add a line to the image, but the top of Trout's back/shoulder is above the top of JT's shoulder. Now, I'm ok with the view that first contact was at the top of the shoulder and ended up in the face. I think that's right - but that is actually illegal, as we see when a player slides up off the ball or shoulder. Nor do we say its legal when a ball carrier drops - as in the Tai incident.

Rob, I'm happy to discuss anything in good faith. I'm not gonna continue this with you.

I am more than able to speak for myself Harry, so you don't need to put words in my mouth. I'll be perfectly blunt here - I don't massively care where the game lands on player safety. That may sound harsh, but it doesn't affect me. Insurance goes up? That's for the clubs to worry about. Brain injuries - sure it's sad, but I can easily crack on with my life and be comfortable with the fact that the players chose this career, just as boxers and MMA fighters do. I don't really have to care tbh. Of course from a human being point of view I care, but generally these players suffer post-career - out of sight out of mind, why should it bother me - that's for the authorities to decide. Where I do have an issue - and I suspect this is where we broadly align is around the constant movement on tolerance levels and outright inconsistencies making the game a challenging and frustrating watch at times. If the sport has decided that we need to protect players heads and lower the tackle count, fine. Some will continue to enjoy the game, some will be put off that. Just like any other change really. Some don't like the 10m rule versus the old 5 yard rule - but the game evolves and i enjoy watching RL now, just as I did back in the 80's. However some of the debate around incidents in recent weeks have shown some real problems with how this is being policed in the game, and in reality it is having real consequences on the sport and individual matches. We seem to be seeing random issues at the moment being singled out. We saw cards galore at the Hull KR v Leeds match for example, yet play down incidents at other matches. As a comp we are a bit all over the place at the moment - I don't think fans have a clue what will happen when we see an incident being reviewed. Add to it, the commentary from refs just says vague things like 'there were two mitigants' but then don't explain what they are, and then the disciplinary doesn't even mention it. As I say, players are adults and make their own decisions, but we are seeing substantial head contacts in games and then waving play on, or reviewing as legal by the VR and Match Commissioner. That's different to last year. It's different to a few weeks ago. And it could easily be different to some matches this weekend.

Cool. So the game has decided that Tai's is a foul - and I agree, it is a foul, but we are going to excuse other tackles which are much higher from the ground because Trout has a slight bend at the knee? That seems rather inconsistent. Grab 3 absolutely shows the point of impact. Photo's will always show up as blurry, but there is no trickery here, I have captured that screen and it is his head hitting the shoulder. I didn't appreciate the refs comments about McNamara, I watched it back many times, but not the full three minutes or so to the refs comments. I watched the tackle with my own eyes, and as the screengrab clearly shows, there is contact with the head. It doesn't really matter on other people's opinions, I am giving my opinion. We know the ref didn't think it was a foul.

On the 2nd tackle. I have some sympathy with the position that Trout bent his back on this, I think grab 1 shows this. However I would also add that grab 2 does show that Trout is still pretty high here. This isn't a low tackle, and as with the Tai incident, height does not cancel out foul play. So i suppose that does bring us on to the question of was it foulnplay. And this is where I completely disagree with the ref and the views here. The below screen grab shows the impact, this is prior to the ricochet into McNamara. There is clear contact with Trout's shoulder and Thewlis' head. The McNamara part of the incident is irrelevant. The shoulder hits the chin.

To address this one first.... I don't think this is a good tackle. He turns his body and there isn't a clear wrapping tackling motion. Sure, we can talk about the wrist being a few inches from his body etc. but it is a shoulder charge, and as per screen grab 2 his shoulder is up round the height of the head of the ball carrier. It is also at head height of the other tacklers. The stuff about the slap was a bit of nonsense - the replays don't really even suggest he was touched by that, certainly not to the level to leave a player on the floor groggy. I'm not sure we can look at Screen 2 on that and say that is a perfectly fine tackle with no danger for the ball carrier. There is a reason we banned shoulder charges like this and we can try and find technical.mitigation all we want, while players are getting injured.

The BBC are doing a solid job of advertising it during their live games, games that attract the biggest audiences of the year. This is where them having SL games, Cup games and internationals makes sense.

The RFL do tend to make numbers up in advance and they usually fall short.