Hello

It's the same in all sports Blues Ox - money talks. The hope would be/is to get more teams talking

Hope so, to see such large enthusiastic crowds at a new domestic club in a new country would be fantastic for the sport!

Short term 14 would not be unrealistic. Of course some teams would be weaker, like any league ever.

Absolutely, you are right. But that's not the answer to the question why do people (in general) want 14 The union world cup is breaking records in attendance, viewing etc left right and centre, while RL contracts more and more. Action is urgently needed to try and reverse this, surely?

Because they want to expand the game

I agree with this, but I hope that they can get themselves in gear to reverse some of this decline.

Sorry to ask, but not wanting to trawl through lots of pages to find the answer, can someone tell me the latest ticket sales for the final? From what I've gathered they have been promising figures so far.......

But Leauge 1 in football is the third tier, like in RL, but unlike RL it is below 44 teams in the Premier League and Championship. Plus, this is a very personal level of competition to the teams involved, not like the Challenge Cup, which equates to the FA cup, or the Grand Final, which equates to winning the Premier League. So there's no comparison. RL would bite your hand off to have 5% of 54k attending the RL League 1 play-off final. In such a hugely popular sport, why would many neutrals choose to go to the play off final of the third tier, more than 44 teams down the pecking order?

True

If that's close to true, then proportionally that s solid progress on two or three years back I think

One thing is, at pretty much any given point in the season nearly every squad can rightly say that they have key players injured. That`s the nature of such physical sport. For sure there is luck in who gets the most key players injured, but it´s not always easy to judge who has been the "unluckier" with injuries because so many players get injured during the course of a season.

Very true, this has to be worked on yeah? Or do we just throw the towel in as a sport. You got any idea of the crowd today Fev?

It would be great for the sport to have decent teams in both Sheffield and London. I would have liked a close game regardless of who won. What was the crowd like (at the beginning) please? Attendances often don´t seem to make it into the attendance thread.

Nothing at all against Doncaster, but come on the Cru! Would be great for the sport to have a Welsh presence back in the second tier. Pob lwc Crusaders!!!

They've never once been semi finalists in the union world cup fyi .. edit, jumped in before seeing above reply sorry

Yes and no I would say. Back in the day London had half decent crowds but this wasn't built on in the way that successful expansion teams manage to do. Similar probably in North Wales where crowds declined over time I believe. So yes, the planning and strategy wasn't great, but at times there was interest that could have been exploited. Toronto different kettle of fish, loads of interest generated there and here but most of the clubs voted for what they perceived was best in the short term, lack of vision in my opinion

I take your point and, yes, for sure there are positives. But in the ten odd years I have been watching SL has lost its Welsh team, it's London team, gained and lost its Canadian team and further down we've lost Hemel, Oxford, Gloucester etc. I would argue that with the significant drop in crowds over that time that Broncos are not doing well, certainly their fans on here say not. Pacific island nations have lot of heritage players and little domestic action as far as I can tell, though I hope that it is increasing and would like to be corrected

Very sad. RL - going strongly against the grain. Other sports around the world expanding into new countries and areas. RL, contracting rapidly and increasingly disappearing from sight.

Sorry eal, please accept my apologies. I didn't mean to quote you in this reply, I was trying to reply to another post that seems to have dissappeared.

If you're referring to my comment then there's nothing xenophobic about me. I live in Spain and am teaching myself Spanish and have friends from Germany, US, Argentina, Italy and other countries that I socialise with. iF you are referring to my comment then I can't understand what is xenophobic about wanting to have countries that have international teams at least having some sort of domestic participation. I don't mind SOME heritage players, of course, it just becomes farcical when there are hardly any players living in the country that they are representing at a world cup. I want us to give support to nations to expand domestically and kudos to the likes of Greece for trying to do so.

I've got a proven track record on these forums of supporting the expansion of RL, please check out my posts, but there's some serious delusion on this thread in comparing RL international heritage teams, of which there are many who have basically little to no domestic game, with the other international sports that I've seen mentioned here who may have SOME but far from all foreign born players. Please don't peddle this nonsense, get a grip and try any find what we can do to actually develop RL beyond having 15 grandchildren playing for their grandparents place of birth. Maybe take a leaf out of the book of the minor European nations who are fighting to arrange internationals amongst themselves with little to no help from the IRL. Peace

To be fair that ignores all of the other matches, selective

With respect, football tinkers also. I feel that much of the issue for RL's lack of popularity is self-inflicted with a lot of resistance and fear of letting anyone new in on the secret

Yeah, just watched about a quarter of an hour of it myself. I was surprised by the standard of play also to be fair.

Fair point. Also, you should never ever " drop all efforts" , you can always at least chat at no cost to a stranger at a bar somewhere about the sport and try and persuade them to watch a game.