Cerulean

Thank you for the response. The competitivity and profile of a second division should be enhanced by the annual opportunity of 1 of the 10 being promoted, but this alone would be nowhere near enough. It's an issue that needs examination: but starting with a belief that teams 11 to 20 in the Northern Hemisphere are of some value to the sport, might help.

Sorry: I was being flippant, and I apologise. There are some sensibly thought out responses here, and mine doesn’t deserve to be amongst them. I like your possible sugestion of a 10 team Super League as a way forward: 5 games each round, closely matched, hard fought, with a 1 team promotion and relegation to a competitive and high profile second division: it could raise the look of the sport, and encourage ambition.

"... and how do we fix it?" A 9 team Super League, it seems. And if a further gap opens up, move to a 6 or 7 team Super League. Any other ideas? Suggesting bringing the lesser teams up to the standard of the top ones is not an answer to the question. Perhaps if we call the lesser teams "passengers" loud enough and often enough, that will do it.

And I genuinely know pensioners for whom £40 for a couple is pretty close to their food spending for a week, and certainly exceeds their discretionary income. These are folk who worked continuously for 50 years, paid taxes, were significant net contributors to society, and lived a particularly frugal life for a good part of it. They save every penny - literally, every penny - for a one week a year holiday, if they were fortunate. If you have no personal memory of growing up, taking your place in the work force, and the frugality of life in the 50s and 60s in the deprived sections of society, me trying to persuade you will not work. In fact I agree that there is no reason for OAP concessions. If buying a £20 pizza, or £20 entry to a sporting contest, or a gap year doing nothing, or a car when you are 18, or financing an extensive bucket list, or a daily artistically produced coffee, cannot be afforded, so be it. Most folk have plenty of things they can’t afford.

Geesh! There are long term fans, decades of watching, playing, supporting coaching, teaching, and preaching the game, who are worried that RL is not where it could be, should be, and deserves to be, and that the adjustments we are seeing may not be enough. Your tedious and predictable comment may get you support from like-minded others, which you can incorporate into a certificate to be printed and framed and hung on the wall, but please remember that governance without wide scrutiny is highly likely to go astray.

Don Fox. Scrum half, loose forward, prop - only a small part of what he could do in the game.

If the weather was at all decent, my son and I would drive up on a Saturday to camp in Langdale for the night, then over the pass and on to a match in Cumbria on the Sunday. It was always further than we'd thought. We certainly felt that we'd earned a game. Wonderful memories.

It’s always worth investigating why kids - and others - take an interest in a sport sufficient to invest time, money, and enthusiasm in it. I may have been unaware of comparative existences as a child, but for me it was an escape from a cold, grey, impoverished 1950s world; the sport a massive part of the town’s life, an activity to become immersed in, played in streets and gardens and parks and playgrounds; free, always available; the professional game a pinnacle of what we did, cheap to access, local heroes, thrilling, a gateway to other places and other names; the beginnings of ambition in general, and identifiable pathways for progress in the sport. Clearly a world long gone, so I’m not worth asking. But do ask those of today’s world what it would take to encourage them to invest time, money, and long-term enthusiasm in this activity which, after all, is just one of thousands of other activities seeking to capture young attention. In other words - and here’s a thread you could start - what are the game’s USPs, and are they equally applicable in established areas and areas chosen for development?

Took my nephew down to Bridgend, hours of traffic, arrived just in time for a much needed pint in the pub nearest to the ground and asked for a pint of Brains. "Brains is off today" I was told.

Yes, remember that at a couple of grounds.

Carl Dooler, spotting a break from the scrum, to score against Leeds and take Rovers to Wembley, semi-final 1967, at Fartown. I can play it in my head as if a high definition video. Then amongst 76,000 at Wembley, Tom Brophy's early try to put Barrow in the lead I can see clearly, but the rest is, oddly, something of a blur.

I listened enthralled to my grandfather (born 1897, a family from Ireland, working as navvies in the Midlands, moving to the northern coalfields at the turn of the century, himself working down the mine a week before his 12th birthday). He was captivated by this wonderful new sport, immersed himself in it, and shared tales of Harold Wagstaff, Hunslet’s “Terrible Six”, the four cups, T’old Tin Pot and the county matches. He was at Odsal in 1954. Lions and Kangaroo tours. And so much more. My grandchildren have no interest in the game, in spite of living within sight of one of the game’s iconic grounds, so I have no one to pass on my stories: streams of coaches on the M1 on Wembley day, the exploits of Roger Millward, Alex Murphy, Paul Charlton, Paul Newlove, Martin Offiah, “Alfie” Langer; 30,000 crowds at Wakefield, 30 different ground to visit. And so much more. For the younger ones, what will your tales be to your grandchildren as they help on the allotment on a Saturday morning? Perhaps glittering nights at Old Trafford at the end of the season, the astonishing stamina and endurance of Graham and Roby, the footwork of Tomkins, the attacking intervention of the best Australian full-backs. And so much more. It would be good to know. The “rose-tinted spectacles” comment is employed to reinforce an argument, score points, win “likes”, and is brought in to be purposefully offensive in an environment very much lacking in respect. It would be nice if better discussion techniques were used.

We were taught to tackle around the thighs, from the front, with the head to one side. Any second man needed would tackle around the chest. The coaching manuals of the 60s and 70, were full of such illustrations. You were taught, as a tackler, to “ride” the tackle and soften the impact on yourself, though the tougher players would drive forward to put the man “on his backside”. There was never any suggestion of wrestling, or delaying the PTB, or holding up the tackle to involve a third man: the ball carrier was put down as efficiently as possible. There’s plenty of video from the time which displays this. We have allowed, encouraged, and expected the game to evolve from one primarily of evasion to one of impact, where players are recruited, coached, selected, on their ability to dominate in an impact situation. We are now seeing the consequences.

This could possibly be the most astute summary of the sport’s predicament I’ve ever seen, and would form an ideal starting point for all future discussion.

Sorry, fella, don't know what you're thinking, but that isn't me: I'm comfortable in owning my present lugubrious view of the sport. You should, perhaps, apologise. Again, I'd hoped to convert some acquaintances to my sport, and be entertained myself, by a potentially exciting international series. I was disappointed, I don't believe I achieved any converts, and I doubt that the whole series attracted many new fans. And I don't really want to blame Tonga for that. I do believe that excessive positivity by many in the sport is counter-productive and can obfuscate problems and lead to complacency. You can certainly be rewarded with a good deal of support on this forum if you work at smashing down anyone who displays a touch of negativity. Or attempts to provide balance.

Excellent! That’s more the spirit I expect. Though you did miss out on calling me a flat capped, flat earth dinosaur, wearing rose tinted spectacles, and from an impoverished and depressed little northern town. I’d been hoping to see some of the flamboyance, exhilaration and ball-handling, of a group of players we rarely get to see, and I’d persuaded others to join me. I was disappointed. If you need to label my comments as being “incredibly bitter”, so be it. Oh, and when England have played Australia under an Australian referee, were there never any comments about two different refereeing cultures?

Thank you for a full, well composed, interesting, analytic response to my moan. With that level of input, perhaps you should post more. I'm disappointed that the way teams respond to the "flavour" of rule application chosen by the referee should be such a major component of the sport, but it is, and that's my hard luck.

They were suffocated by line speed (offside, really, the referee sprinting up with the defensive line to avoid giving a penalty, the line setting off before the ball had cleared the ruck); slowing down the play-the-ball by a third and fourth man spreading himself on top off the uppermost tacker; extended upright tackling which involves holding the opponent up and pushing and pulling until the referee can remember the word “held”. A pity, really: I’ve been very much looking forward to this Tonga team and their exciting brand of rugby. This highly praised England team would look very different under rule interpretations closer to the actual laws of the game. Overly negative and unbalanced, perhaps, but I do like to see two sides play when I watch team sport.

Could you, perhaps, list these powerful and destructive entities which are running the show and victimising SL, so that we on the forums can better direct out contempt?

Just guessing: could that be Peter Stirling?

Thank you for your response. I use the phrase “dominance by impact” because I believe it characterises the modern game, and has developed as an accidental consequence of adjusting interpretation of the rules to speed up play. Bigger, faster players dominate at points of impact; and recruitment, training, selection, investment, reflect this. It wasn’t always so, and does not need to be always so. You are right: reducing impact in the short to medium term is a desperately difficult problem. Medium to long term, with some serious intent, adjustments to the rules - and the interpretations - could mean that players like Oledzski would have to slim down to become more effective, rather than bulk up. As an aside (yes, a long time ago) a player like Peter Smith - Featherstone and Great Britain - would have stopped Oledzski, by himself, at first contact, time after time, with a perfectly executed leg tackle. Suck tacklers are still in the game, but the reluctance to give up 2 or 3 metres after contact means that upright tackling is preferred. It shouldn’t be difficult to find ways to seriously reduce upright tackling. The very survival of the sport is threatened and many things have to change. Not everyone will get what they want.

Perhaps it can. The rules (laws, if you like) have drifted to favour dominance by impact, where larger players are more valuable. There may be possible ways to reduce dominance by impact: An early call of held will reduce the value of the wrestle, reduce the value of the upright tackle. An insistence of greater use of the arms in the tackle. Punishment of unnecessary roughness, dangerous contact. Preventing the drag into touch which effectively narrows the pitch and pushes play into a narrower corridor, encouraging impact. A much more strict enforcing of offside at the PTB, no forward movement until the ball clears the foot may give attackers more opportunity to identify weaknesses in the defensive line up. When we talk of speeding the game up, we generally refer to a faster PTB: cleaning and slowing down the PTB could, with the right intent, speed up ball movement. 5 tackles instead of 6 could be considered. And others. I’m quite sure those more deeply involved in the sport could develop a better list than this, if the incentive by necessity is there. Much of this would encourage evasion, footwork, dominance by smaller, more agile, and more visionary players. Of course much of this would destroy the spectacle for many of today’s fans. And dominance by impact is very much entrenched in recruitment, training, and development; and is really the essence of the modern game, and so would be very very difficult to retreat from. But when the alternatives are losing the game altogether, or moving to 10 a side (which would still bring in the measures I listed), perhaps the approach needs to be considered.

A horror story. For goodness sake, begin to take this issue seriously. Look at ways to keep the sport, but seriously reduce the impact nature of it. The game has evolved to more and more favour large, fast, powerful players, and dominance by impact. It doesn’t have to be this way.

You’re right of course: I make more noise than I should when I’m watching rugby, constantly being told off for it when watching tv at home. Whenever possible, I stand to watch live rugby, where the commentary is assembled from those around me, and I love the experience of being immersed in it; the succinct phrases, the arising conversations, the gentle arguments, the yells of delight, the groans of exasperation; and the surprising amount of consensus. Watching sport on tv (for me: cricket, RL, athletics, RU, a little football), you only see what the director chooses for you to see. In Rugby League, I struggle with the constant switch from tight on the play-the-ball to wide angle for the movement, and would most like the commentary to identify the significant players and fill in anything which happened off camera. I love background stories and historical references in sport (cricket excels in this) but there is rarely room for such in British RL, though Australian RL manages. With British RL, I rarely last longer than a few minutes before turning the sound off. This is not so in Australian RL, and not so in my other sports where I need more input than I can gather from the screen. Except for cricket, that is, where Sky increasingly tends to use two or three voices, often ex-players and particularly ex-England captains for whom, I believe, the mute button was invented. An aside: county cricket now has youtube live video at most matches, and here the commentators are excellent - generally having developed their craft in radio and journalism. We are lucky these days: the camera work on tv sport is usually very good, on Sky generally outstanding. For me, the commentary is not at the same standard. Fortunately for most others, I’m not in charge.

Yes, probably a more valid point of view than mine. I watch most of my rugby without sound. The biggest game of the year, in terms of exposure, is coming up: I hope the commentary doesn’t let the game down: I hope it enhances the visual and helps create a greater following for the sport.