Dave T

Surely Serious About Rugby League have made you a job offer by now?

interesting development

Could end up a long list here, but my shortlist: 1 - @Spidey has already called it, but the 2008 WC Final was unbelievable. Great stadium, city, atmosphere and a brilliant match with the Aussies losing the final in their own backyard. Brilliant stuff! 2 - 1994 - GB v Aus at Wembley. That JD try, Edwards getting sent off, over 50k at Wembley, great day out, superb memories. 3 - As a Wire fan, have been lucky with those Wembley wins, so could pick any of them over the last 15 years, but that 2nd win, when we hammered Leeds was a personal highlight. A special mention has to go to the semi final in 2009 when we beat Wigan, looked like being an easy one and ended up tense!

It's clear that the camps were to try and meet the number of registered players, and national team piece, but that's a waste of time without teams.

It's confusing as to what Scotland's actual strategy was. If you read the requirements, for full membership you needed 6 clubs, playing 5 games minimum, with an open age and youth team in each club. Scotland were miles off that, and tbh it never looked like that was a focus for them. It feels like they should have been focusing on a concentrated geographical area and tapping into existibg sports club infrastructure to piggyback them. Instead all the activity seemed focused on things like youth training camps in Wigan or similar.

Agreed, was just giving my take on it. I'm sure somebody somewhere enjoyed that Olympic Stadium game. Didn't they?

I expect they'll be very quiet on announcing numbers. This isn't very detailed, but on Play Store it says SL+ has 1k+ downloads. Other categories are 10k+ and upwards, so it looks like low thousands downloaded (not subscribed), although not sure how many different versions of tge app are out there on different platforms.

Seems a good idea, SL+ has probably gone a but quiet, with a lot of focus on Sky's new coverage and the BBC stuff, so giving it a push in a high profile weekend seems a good idea to me.

Yeah, I think that's why one-sided matches, as poor as they can be as a competition, or for the losing team, will often be full of champagne rugby and very enjoyable for one set of fans. I think a poor match would leave both sets of fans and neutrals disappointed.

I assume they are just hoping we all forget this was ever mentioned and we just ignore international comp for 2024. It's not much better Down Under - even though we know there'll be a tournament, nothing has been announced yet.

Really difficult question, plenty of rubbish games over the years, but if I think about one of the most disappointing for me in recent history was the England v New Zealand Test match in 2015 at the Olympic Stadium. I took a mate for his first major RL game, and the game, atmosphere, event, was just thoroughly depressing.

I still love Frozen 2

You jest, but I used to love cup draws.

I notice tonight's is in that lovely family slot of 8.45pm on a Monday.

What it does do though is it creates more variety. Of course it is ultimately likely that an SL club will get knocked out to another SL club, but in the current 1st Rd for SL clubs, they are very likely to just draw an SL club, whereas in 2014 in the first SL round 9 of them drew lower division teams. Also, by SL clubs knocking each other out it does leave opportunity for lower division teams to draw each other and get a lucky draw and make it to a decent stage. Cup comps have unique elements - knockout and the draw. The draw element has become rather less interesting.

Top flight clubs broadly came in at the last 32 for the first 30 years I watched RL (some slightly earlier in the prelims if drawn out). This change to last 16 came in less than 10 years ago and I'm not sure it has been received favourably by any fans. I understand the reasons why these decisions are taken, reduction of games, fitting into calendar, avoiding amateurs v pros etc. but I don't think anyone can make a case that the Cup is better since 2015 when it was changed. Quite the opposite. Putting SL into the cup with 4 other teams is a massive change to putting them in with 20 other teams for the variety that it can bring. As I say, I can understand the reasons, but I don't think it adds anything as a fan, and I agree with those who don't like it. In 2014, we had 14 SL teams, and 5 of them were knocked out in the last 32 - meaning that the last 16 had 7 lower division teams.

I agree and disagree, and I'm not sure I 100% follow your post, which may be why. I'm not sure I agree that football is the issue here, they still have many cups, have great followings at cup finals and absolutely make a fuss of them. I quite like the balance they have. Of course some things will be more important than others, but I do think when we just abandoned many historic comps we did lose something interesting. Following the Aussie model somewhat has harmed us imo. The Cup has to survive, and has to thrive, the decade where Wire were prominent in the cup was one of teh most enjoyable times, the more clubs and fans that experience that the better imo.

I agree. It's typical RL mindset, get over excited, focus on one thing and then be disappointed when it isn't the silver bullet. There is little reason for SL to be involved in Vegas.

They used to give kid members free admission, and adults free for the first round the club entered. They used to get good crowds and then they scrapped it. I'm not sure how the current system which sees clubs get 30-50% of a regular crowd is better. I think it damages the brand and the sport.

I'm stunned whenever anyone tries to deny that point, although it is so obvious now that does seem to have calmed down. I don't know what crowd Wire expect tonight, very few I expect, but an example of how little effort they've put in is in their comms. I've checked a few of their releases about this match, and they don't mention the prices. They simply give a link for tickets and say there are discounts for members. They did summarise the pricing 11 days ago just after the draw, but other than that no mention. Yet they have actually reduced the prices - all adult tickets are £20 for anywhere in the ground, even main stand seats, or £15 for members. They should be shouting about the pricing, but it really feels like this game is an inconvenience tbh.

In reality the vast majority of VR decisions can be made without issue. Neither of us have stats, but I'd expect it to be way over 90% that the VR has more than enough to make a decision (most are simple grounding checks for example). I haven't seen too much that has prevented the VR being able to do their job tbh.

The above is true, but the answer to it isn't necessarily to just cull it. I also don't think the answer is what we currently do either, which is stage half-assed events at £20 a head that are no better than pre-season friendlies off the field.

I'm OK with not having the maximum amount of cameras. There has to be an element of pragmatism here and as long as we can cover the main issues like offsides, grounding etc then that is worthwhile even if it isn't perfect. We can't always have perfection, but we can have a system that's good enough. I think we are broadly there with Sky, but we should always be looking to improve where possible.

Couldn't agree more. If we base things purely on the attendance then we'd have scrapped playoffs a while back too. We have absolute clear evidence of the impact of season tickets vs all pay games. We also used to see that when a round of teh Cup was included in season tickets fans turned up. I've banged on about this for years and years now, we are gonna allow the cup to die if we just keep burying our head in the sand. Just opening the turnstiles isn't good enough to get a crowd in.

That's the thing that gives me some hope, to have a VR you need more cameras really so hopefully the minimum is what we are currently getting at the likes of Catalans games, which is noticeably lesser coverage, but good enough to look professional. I've enjoyed sky's coverage so far.