Stuff Smith

I thought the Sky adverts in the breaks throughout the games absolutely reinforced that opinion.

Up at 6am on a Saturday (which is unheard of) and enjoyed every second of it. How can anyone not love PNG?

Do you enjoy watching rugby league? Or do you only enjoy it if it involves your home town club? If it's the former and you move elsewhere, there's a fair chance you'll end up supporting a different team (and in my case at least, actively disliking your home town club}. Makes for some interesting discussions with your parents over the years when "your" team plays "theirs". And when I say discussions, I mean five or six hour arguments. If that makes me a traitor to some of you, I can name worse. I grew up in major heartlands RL town, knew the father of a kid a couple of year's younger than me who'd tried out for a few of the junior amateur teams in the town and was found out to be not good enough by all of them. (He must have been bad because I was "good enough" to make a team but fundamentally useless.) So he switched to RU and almost immediately played for Lancashire whereupon his whole family became ardent rugby union supporters overnight.

That's a very, very big "if". (I know you know this...)

Nope. No point debating this here, off to PM (if I can work out how to do that...)

Laugh all you want, Hemi4561, they are.

They objectively *are* the best RL supporters in the world though. Or maybe were. Alienated so many, me included.

I've touched on this before, but many "ardent" fans in other sports have only seen the team that they've "supported" since junior school on TV. My advice: watch the NRL and Elite 1.

Unfortunately, I got this glory hunting thing all wrong some time ago. My home town has a hugely successful rugby league club, but I moved south in my twenties, saw the dark that is London Broncos, and was hooked.

I've moved around England (and Wales) quite a bit and I'd say that's more than true. Liverpool "fans" who couldn't find Liverpool on a map. See a hugely successful club, "support" them: maybe I should have done the same.

A four-year old child who had never seen a game of rugby league would offer more insight, even if that four-year old had been raised by wolves. Four-year old wolves would offer more insight.

Sky commentary is going to struggle to get worse than this.

I thought that too.

I'm critical of people who criticize referees, but blimey, that was a bad decision.

There's a narrative for rugby league in certain sections of the British media. It was most biuntly expressed in the mid-90s by a journalist for the London Evening Standard called Michael Herd: it's a game "played by ape-like creatures, watched by gloomy men in cloth caps". Fit that narrative: back page news!