Read an interesting stat on SSN the other week. Johnny Wilkinson England career, 1,111pts - 6 tries. That does say it all about the game.

No, he tackles well above his weight, and used to get injured a lot doing so. Apparently has been playing some good stuff.

No i ain't saying he's rubbish, i'm a fan of him myself. Just using that stat and him as an example to show how much kicking's involved in the game and why its nickname is 'Yawnion.'

by and large i think they are trying to run it more, Ashton, Foden and Cueto are decent attacking players. Fly halves seem to get their attacking instincts coached out of them, Andrew was the same, legend has it he got boll0cked for running the ball from under his own posts en debut (against romania iirc), Barnes was a cracking attacking fly half, but largely lost out to Andrew, Flood actually went through a gap for the first try

Surprised that so much goal kicking is involved in Union and that the first choice goal kicker should kick all of them ?

Not really, he's been in the full England squad since March 98.

If he wasn't such a good number 10, Stuart Barnes would have made a belting number 6 if you follow my drift.

The problem seems to be that RL fans want to turn RU into RL (hence my tongue in cheek statement above), rather than just enjoy RU for what it is, a different game.

Just for the record my post wasn't aimed at anyone in particular just based what I had read on twitter etc

However a lot of you have bitten on to what I said and it's sad how people pick it apart, two different games, two different cultures

There attendences smash ours at the minute

Lawrie, you do know it's our off season don't you....

BTW those saying how much better Union club attendences are these days don't forget the figures are massively skewed by the annual wembley games (where large numbers of tickets are given away...I'm not knocking that we should do the same for Millenium Magic to get local kids there).

Plenty of top flight Union clubs are struggling with over-inflated salaries, low attendances and internationals disrupting the season/taking away attention. So it's no gold plated standard that we can compare SL to.

PS I live in Gloucestershire and work in Bristol so am giving my perspective as someone living in a Union "Heartland"

As I mentioned above even the authorities behind Union don't seem to be able to decide whether they want to turn the game into RL.

Completely agree that RU has adopted some RL style changes over the last few years, but to be honest I think it would be a bit of a shame if they went much further. It's a long time since we had the kick-a-thons of the late 80's on Grandstand every January / February, and the game now is much more watchable, (probably due to the RL influence) so I would be happy for RU to stay as it is, for at least the time being.

Its usually only unwatchable to those who have never seen a competitive scrum in RL, once you understand the difference between the codes in how a team treats its possession then it all falls into place, or should do to those of a reasonable intelligence.

'Annual Wembley games.' Isn't that a bit of a contradiction?

The RFL's figures will be skewed by MM except even when they practically give tickets away they can't half fill the stadium.

It should be an open house showpiece event for the game with the costs being met by the host city whose local economy receives a massive boost. Cardiff alledgedly paid £500K to host the first one, I wonder how much the RFL are now paying for this one?