Quote: gutterfax "The problem with RL is that it sometimes seems to be ashamed of itself...if that makes sense.
It is a far superior product.....I was a lapsed ST holder at Celtic who had played Union, but the first time I went to a London Broncos game, I was hooked.....11+ years and 17,000 posts later, combined with meetings at various levels of the sport and contracts to do stuff here in NZ, I get bloody frustrated at the way the idiots in charge run the game.
This RLWC is great, but in reality, it is actually all about the M62, 2 Aussie states, Auckland and Catalan Dragons.....they deliver 80% of the combatants and no number of badges and pub teams in Serbia is going to change that!'"
That's a very good post. I agree with most of it.
Where I disagree is with your dismissal of the expansion of the game as being pointless and without hope.
At our beginning, we were alone in our northern fastness.
One Baskerville later and we have Australia, two states yes, but the two biggest and most populous, and New Zealand.
Along comes jean Gallia and we had France and how. Without WW11 and Vichy, French RL would today be where Australian RL is. No matter, we survived and it is Avignon that is selling out, not Catalan Perpignan.
Now we have all these fledgling league nations around the world, due , in part, probably to the RU not being able to ban us. I saw a video recently showing the amazing progress being made in Fiji with teams and in schools. This is real progress compared to absolutely nothing when I was a boy. RL in Fiji, impossible we thought.
Likewise Serbia, Ukraine, Chek Republic, Poland, Denmark, Norway. All very minor league stuff but seemingly persevering with it year on year. Small acorns etc.
Lebanon, are you kidding me ? They have a domestic league and missed the World Vup on points average.
Italy, two leagues, chaos BUT youth teams and womens teams as well as a number of men's teams.
Likewise the USA, Canada and Jamaica, heritage player and split leagues notwithstanding. Amazing.Small but amazing. 4,000 to see Canada. We had a World Cup final that didn't draw much more than that !!!
Qualifying games for the World Cup covering two continents. who could have guessed it.
Now, I know that all this is minor league stuff but if we get one more country to emerge from that lot with a vibrant league and able to compete with the Frances and Wales of this RL world, that would be progress indeed and, given our past history, who is to say that there might be some genuine international expansion of our game.
There, of course, might be no such thing but the fact that these countries play out game at all, to me, is progress.
