Agree with most of that Superted.

On the spending front I think partly the money has shifted from transfer fees to wages but mainly like you say there was a lot of frivolous spending that should actually have been spent on club infrastructure.

Leeds were better than most in that regard but even Leeds didn’t invest anything like enough in its infrastructure.
Also it’s a bit of a cycle in that the transfer fee money would essentially flow around the league. If someone buys a player off Leeds then Leeds have that money to spend maybe buying a player from somewhere else. I don’t really see it as a negative that transfer fees are rarer. Just a consequence of going pro.

There was a period where holding a player up then putting 3-4 bodies into a pile on became fashionable and it killed any momentum the attack could generate. I just don't see better defences, I don't see better tacklers and it's easier to have better line speed when the PTB is so slow - you are always set. Also, I definitely think defences "appear" better because we don't have enough players with genuine attacking skills. One prop who offloads came over from Australia to Leeds and caused total havoc in his first couple of seasons.
Any lump can wrestle and charge up and down the 10 metres to lie on a tackled player for 5 minutes while his mates get set. It's not pleasant to watch and it's eventually going to bore the sport to bankruptcy.

I do agree with what Christopher posted, pre 2000 ish the game was "ragged" and you can see the mistake count is high, but the 2000 decade was fantastic. Good balance between attacking skills and tough defence. There were some very good players in that era.

Each to there own, no right or wrong answer

Yeah the 'when they were on' regarding the team and 'in the mood' regarding Iro were two points that i had to include, neither were on or in the mood enough to make us a genuine threat to Wigan...But were both fantastic to watch on there good days.

Despite not being as up for it as they probably should of been at times, that Leeds team were still very good imo, and would of won silverware in most other eras, runners up to one of the best club sides ever in a couple of league campaigns and a couple of challenge cups.

I watched first half of Leeds v Barrow yesterday (I think I was actually at that match but I wasn't living in Leeds at the time), CC game from '93. My son walked in just as Leeds moved the ball from one wing to another to score. He commented on how much better rugby players were in the past. The players in that move were, Andy Gregory, Garry Schofield, Ellery Hanley, Alan Tait, Craig Innes. Skill and pace to die for. Yes, the reality was that most of that game was Leeds slugging away with a team at the bottom of the 3rd division but the ball moved everywhere. I've realized that what made "old" rugby league entertaining was the ball movement. The thing was thrown everywhere.

One thing that team did that I always thought was tremendous was doubling up the centres on the same side of the pitch. Having Iro and Innes suddenly both on the left used to cause havoc and Leeds did it a lot. They would attack from deep with the two of them in tandem and scored a lot of long range tries. Leeds also attacked from every scrum (which were a mess but partly because they pushed). When I first started watching league the "loose" forward was just that - loose - and able to not join the scrum. When they changed the law and you had to have him bound teams started attacking the space it created.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be...

We've almost always been fortunate in the 30+ years I've watched in that we have usually had some great backs that can utilise the space if they get good early ball. When we've combined that with a good pack we've won things (or gone very close) and I still believe in the saying that "the forwards decide who wins, and the backs by how much"...

I think I'm in the majority who see the rugby of the past, where there was more space due to fatigue mostly, as more exciting precisely because the ball was moved more to exploit that space. 2 subs on the bench instead of 4 and only 4 rotations massively to create that space. Given the lack of current activity, you'd hope that those running the game would think about what it could look like as well as how we will keep the game going.

Pffft......give over. Its a different sport these days to the 80s, 90s and noughties. The players now are different athletes to those days.

The reason there was more room in those days was because players trained in the pub after a game of touch n pass. There was no defensive structures whatsoever, mo idea of wrestling and tackling techniques.

Come on, we can all look back and talk about how amazing past players was, and in their era they was but its a different game now.

You’re actually confirming my point I think. The fatigue isn’t only down to the lower number of interchanges, it’s also due to the conditioning of the players too.

The wrestle is unfortunate from my perspective and could easily be penalised out of the game, but it’s a fine balance between too slow and too fast.

It is most definitely a different game these days.

Those Hanley tries from 94 and 95 sum up the way the game was played then. Whoever put the vid together picked maybe 30 of his best. There are top sides whose entire first 17 don't score such a variety of spectacular efforts over 2 seasons nowadays.

Hanley was an unbelievable player though, personally I think he's comfortably in the top 5 or even top 3 players to ever play the game.

Completely get the point about most players not transitioning between eras at the same level, although they would have access to better quality training methods some would still end up down t'pub.

Hanley was a standour because of his physical ability more than his passing or kicking, and that would transfer to any era. He was simply a beast of a player, someone that would be a legend no matter when they played.

Agree fully with the 2 previous posts. Can the modern game produce another Ellery Hanley or is the wrestle and the three man tackle king?

You're saying players from the 2000's (which ended 10 years ago) were not as fit as the players today? There is no magic wand waved now to make players "fitter" than they were 10/20 years ago. The game went pretty much full pro back in the mid 90's and full pro when SL started - over 20 years ago. The game today is littered with defensive errors, so much so that attacking play consists of hitting it one up, kicking it and seeing if someone makes a mistake. Nobody offloads and skillful passing is on the wane so defending is easy. I watched the Leeds/Saints league game from '07 last night. It was played at a pace I haven't seen in a SL game for years. The key tries had to be scored by brilliant offloading, support and passing. Defence was outstanding and attack had to be better. A lot of that Leeds team were still playing 10 years later when their legs had gone and were coping perfectly well with the "pace" of the modern game.

My guess is that the training and player development focus shifted to big lumps like we have trudging around today who can do an extra couple of laps in a bleep test rather than those who have genuine pace can pass, kick or read a game.

I hate wrestling by the way.

Ellery Hanley would have gone straight to Union and earned 500 grand a year.

Without a doubt. Imagine how many tries he would have scored if he'd been wearing one of the skin tight shirts they wear today? Did nobody work out that baggy shirts were easy to grab hold of? I think Bradford were the first team to tighten things up as I remember.