St Etrigan

So another specialist position - makes sense

Its taken 3 pages before the one person who shows that we do have athletes who match the opening posters criteria. Alex Walmsley, there are others of a similar height Pauli Pauli, Mose Masoe, others that don't spring to mind. The OP misses out the point that the height of the players in RU and NBA is precisely the reason they are in the team, in other contact sports it can be a liability being too tall. I could be wrong but does football have these giants playing the sport at the top level, I can only think of Crouch at the 6'5" plus size. If there is an advantage to just having players of that height and build then football has the resources to bring them through.

Best place to look would be Airbnb - got City centre rooms in there from £25 per night and even flats from £75 per night for the whole weekend

Help!

This was posted on a different forum If true then Anfield area would be clear of runners by 1130. On some other points there are approx. 16 bars within 1km of the stadium plus there is a permanent fan zone at the Anfield road end of the stadium. Getting to the Centre of Liverpool between games isn't really an option, but is easily done before and after the games, if you are not up for the 2 mile walk then buses run about every 5 mins to the city from right outside the stadium and that is before any shuttlebus. The distance to the city centre isn't much different from Man City's ground and has a lot more local to the stadium, the major difference is the amount of space around the two grounds

I guess that is why I am saying what I am. I don't think that RL 9's is a less demanding sport than full 13's, if anything you may need to be fitter. In RL we have fast agile forwards and faster agile backs, they are mostly (not all obviously) of a similar body type, 9's doesn't reduce the requirement at the tackle, We don't really do scrums so less players in a scrum offers no benefit, it may present a skilful player with a little more room to put somebody through a gap but that is about it. Union 7's are very different to the 15's. Scrums are reduced so no requirement for specialist positions, rucks and mauls are limited so all of the dark art that goes on in them is not required, lineouts are reduced and no specialist lineout jumpers needed, lack of kicking as ball retention is paramount, lots of room on a pitch to use the fast players who maybe are not quite up to the full 15's international standard. 7's is a less demanding short form and a very good way to develop both league skills and league type players - not 9's

I don't understand the need to have a 9's competition at all. In Union I can see the need for a 7's, it is less than half of a team and requires a mostly different skill set and definitely requires players who are fast, ultra fit and have abilities that the full game doesn't really require - it is closer to RL than the full 15 a side. Where as RL 9's is pretty much the same game with a few more gaps on the field. I personally feel it is just RL trying to match the success that Union 7's has produced. If we want to do that then why not enter a RL sevens team in the RU competition and show them how its done like we did years ago when we taught them how sevens could look when done right.

I think we have learnt that we now have some depth to the squad and potentials for the next few years. Here is my take on the players that could easily be playing for England/GB over the next 2 years (some have less of a chance than others obviously) Fullback Lomax, Tomkins, Connor, Hardaker, Walker, Ratchford, Shaul Wing Makinson, McGilvery, Johnson, Hall, J. Burgess, Manfredi, Charnley Center Connor, Gildart, Percival, Lyne, Watkins, Griffin Halves Williams, Tomkins, Myler, Connor, Gale, Richardson, Widdop, Sneyd Prop T. Burgess, G. Burgess, Thompson, Hill, Graham, Walmsley, Lees, Taylor, Oledzki, Singleton, Mulhern Hooker Hodgson, Clarke, Roby, McShane, McIllorum, Houghton Second row Bateman, Whitehead, Greenwood, Currie, S. Burgess Loose forward O’Loughlin, Thompson, Milner, S. Burgess, Ward Have I missed anyone out?

RLIF website is down - perhaps cant cope with the number of people trying to find out what the next steps are

Maybe you have access to more data, I only have access to all games back to 1950, and since 1951 was larger this was comparing the crowds since then The larger games were as below, as you can see 3 of the 4 are in London and one was a double header and a WC SF, so hardly a fair comparison 2013 London 67545 2015 London 44393 1993 London 36131 1998 Bolton 27486

It is a complete data set of all Games V NZ in the UK, the idea was to see if 26k was a poor attendance or just an attendance that looked poor because it was in a large stadium. Turns out it was the 4th largest attendance of all of these games since 1951, this weekends will be the third largest, will it also look poor in a large stadium? This was more about showing the people who think this series has been poorly attended who do not necessarily have all of the facts. The Hull game turns out was poorly attended in comparison to the other two and maybe what some people are basing their statements on. Could the games have attracted larger audiences? of course they could, but its not much use people complaining about poor attendances when historically they are not shown to be poor. Have there been other extenuating circumstances for previous attendances? Quite possibly, but those attendances stand as fact and not a lot we can do about them now.

Bit more to it than that if you see the post above

I am not trying to gain any points here, I was comparing games mainly due to the fact that most people were stating that Anfield looked half empty and a poor advert for the game, I was quite surprised that the attendance was as high as it was when compared to other games against NZ, it then stood out that the only higher games attendance (except the one in Bolton that I just missed) were all in London. It just tries to bring into perspective the size of the crowd

No its just comparing like for like.

Thanks