Not even if they are some arbitrarily chosen French team? Or the winner of the 2nd rate, French semi pro league...surely they both deserve to be playing (several games over the same weekend - at the start of the new season) for the right to be crowned world champions?

Please think before you post in future, you obviousy havent considered this properly at all

Why change it? What's wrong with what we do now?

When we had a number of teams playing before it didn't work. There are too many Aussie teams that are better than our top teams. The lower teams in SL would get hammered.
The crowds won't come to watch that.

Leave it as one big game and market it well. One day we will be able to play it at Old Trafford.

Until the NRL side see it as more than a contractual obligation and take it seriously then the WCC will never fill Old Trafford.

My god... it doesnt even fill the Reebok, Elland Rd or Huddersfields ground.


Players from the NRL champions have drawn straws in the past.. to see who doesnt come. What player wants to fly 12,000 miles to a UK winter to play a meaningless fixture? The players have got a long tough season ahead of them in the NRL and dont want to waste what little time off they have by coming to the UK.

The WCC is a dead duck. It only matters to the English clubs and their supporters. It's a relic left over from the 70's and 80's when the game was very different.

Scrap it now.

Watch how the Melbourne players reacted at full time in this years WCC, or when the Roosters nilled St Helens, or the looks on the faces of Wayne Bennett and Darren Lockyer after Brisbane lost to St Helens, and then try to say that they didn't care.

For every Bulldogs or Wests Tigers who treated it like a holiday there are teams who will come over to try and win. The NRL should remind every team that is going to take part in this fixture that it is representing the NRL and Australia as its champions, and therefore should take the occasion seriously.

The Old Trafford comment is exactly what I was saying Barry. There is no point expanding until you make the one off game a bigger game.

I disagree that the aussies don't take it seriously. I can't imagine any player at that level just turning up for the sake of it. They even play warm up games now so that they are fully prepared.

and as for the throwback to the 70s and 80s comment. Think you need to do some research on the dates. There was one game in the 70s when Sts went out for a game simply planned between the two clubs and then the WCC started in 87.

Well yes... I know.

Thats why I said it was a throwback to the 70's and 80's?