The elephant in the room with union and its southern hemisphere bias? Doubt you can find a single article acknowledging it either...

Rugby league. It so dominates rugby union in Australasia in terms of media (NZ with 4 million pop - ie. far less than Sydney) - I mean you have stuff.nz and nzherald as the only widely read written NZ on-line sources lol - that it continues to have a massive impact on union where it counts. That is in the best country at it - NZ.

You can even see it in the way the All Blacks play, basically rugby league to union rules.

Surely that is pretty obvious to rugby league fans?

ITV don't care about live sport other than football. They might bury some cycling away on ITV4 somewhere, but that's about it in terms of the sports coverage.

Neither Channel 4 nor Channel 5 give a fig about live sport, other than 4's Saturday horse racing.

If RL wants to be on free to air TV, then it's the BBC or nothing and they know it. Hence the BBC can coast along in its happy little bubble with Kear and Davies chirping out cliches like a pair of demented furbies. Much as I might take Davies to task for not knowing/understanding the current obstruction interpretation, when an international coach sat next to him gets the same incident wrong what does that say about his ability as a pundit?

Crabtree doing interviews is cringeworthy. He's so stilted and wooden in his delivery it's like he's struggling to remember what he's going to say. While I appreciate you're probably not going to get Tanya Arnold inside the dressing rooms at the end of the game, put someone like Wilkin in who can at least string a sentence together in there.

The annoying thing for me was just a few hours before the game started 5 live had a Rugby special on.
Naively thinking it would be about the England NZ game I tuned in, but it no it was all about what went wrong
with England in the Union World cup. Not a mention of the League test match being shown on BBC 2 a few hours later.

Regarding the mentions of the series from the BBC (& elsewhere in the media), I don't really blame them to be honest.

I think International RL has dug the hole it finds itself in over the past 20 years by treating the International game as an after thought. If the sport treats it as such, why would the media be that interested?

Before this series England hadn't played at home for two years. Our International calendar has been a joke and only takes place for a few weeks in an Autumn. We've previously played most of it at small, northern stadia.


Hopefully this is starting to change. All three games have sold really well, and we've woken up and realised that we must have an International presence in the capital. The International calendar is better than it was, but still lacks forward thinking.

We need to give the media the games (events) to speak and get excited about.

I really don't get the vitriol directed at Jiffy. I mean are you saying he's worse than Stevo and Wiggy? Seriously????
As an aside, Jiffy's comments re. Sam Burgess last night were spot on.

Well we actually made the BBC Breaksfast sport news this morning and Nicky Campbell interviewed Steve Macnamara Five Live this morning and mentioned himself that the game at the Olympic Stadium will be a good spectacle.