Quote: jpk3lly "Think the concept just needs time to bed in, origin took a while to get support in Australia and look at it now. I appreciate that it was a poor game and weather was horrendous but given time I think it will come good and people will start to follow it. Like the 5 nations idea too, but having the England knights compete in that to stop it being just an England whitewash every year.
I also think it would be cool for England to do a tour of southern hemisphere one year and play 5 matches against PNG, NZ, NSW, Queensland and Australia.'"
Sadly, I can't see it.
I liked the concept when it came out, and would have gone last year but I'm just sick of going to Headingley.I went last night and hated it. The atmosphere was non-existent, the Exiles clearly didn't give a damn, the match was truly dreadful and utterly pointless.
I hate criticisng it, as I can see what the RFL are trying to do is for England's benefit, and if they sat back and did nothing, we'd all be slaughtering them for allowing the Aus/NZ dominance of international RL to continue without any effort from us to stop it. We weren't getting much of a test off France so I can see why they altered it, but do we honestly believe that non-event benefitted England's chances in the World Cup next year?
All it did was convince me to not attend another game like that. I went to Wembley and to Elland Road to watch England but I'm not going to watch anything like that again. If the powers that be wanted the Exiles concept to catch on and improve, then they shouldn't have allowed McNamara to pick the same failures we've seen at International level time and time again, and picked a squad with exciting talent that could have learned from the experience, and found a way to encourage the exiles to look like it at least sort of mattered to them.