There's a fella down here in London who works for The RFL called David Lawrenson. He emphasised the point to us (I setup a club down here along with another fella) that the best way to get publicity is to spoon-feed underpaid and overworked journalists with material on a regular basis.

Shame that one (talented) bloke out in the field has more of a clue than those at HQ (although this is entirely consistent with my own experience of the RFL over the past five or so years anyway...).

I fail to believe that for a six figure salary we couldn't get someone better than Nige.

There is nothing much wrong with RL as a sport, in fact it is one of the greatest team sports ever and remains so, what the problem is is the way its leaders treat it with their inability to run the sport from week to week and year to year. The main aspect is officiating and application of the rules (or lack thereof) during matches, its vaugue, inconsistent and often illogical and most definitely unprofessional from top to toe. There's also the inequity/consistancy regarding the disciplinary.

It's down to the RFL to make the game appealing by cleaning things up and having defined rules that officials keep to. Players/coaches soon come into line when penalised to death.
It's down to the RFL to come up with initiatives to selk the game, clubs can only do so much within their locality and as far as I can tell the vast majority do have lots of community stuff going on. Again the problem lies at the door of the RFL Who have being impotent for decades and basically sat on their laurels with next to no clue how media and attracting new fans (& sponsors) works.
As a sport we've missed the boat and missed it big time, in an ever shrinking market we are surviving on crumbs. It's almost laughable that each SL club only receives the equivalent of £19,230 per week from TV sponsorship.
At the end of the current sky deal as a sport I really worry for us and the future despite how entertaining rugby league is.

At the end of the day a lot of this boils down to £££s. The RFL just doesn't have the kind of cash reserves required to push the sport. They made a pre-tax profit last year of £201,000 ffs. Half the clubs want rid of Wood, while the other half are quite happy to tread water. The RFU made £15million from their World Cup alone. There needs to be a drastic overhaul of the game in this country if we're ever going to compete with them. Or the NRL could just lend us a few million from its deal...

Do you know about the old addage about speculating to accumlate, the RFl have several million in cash reserves, that's despite the Bradford debacle. Maybe they should have stopped giving away tickets virtually free for events like magic weekend, maybe if they had the event closer in the middle of the country MORE fans from other areas would fill the grounds and be okay with a few more quid to pay for a ticket because they aren't having to travel 250+ miles
Maybe if the fat-bastrds stopped paying themselves over the auditors guidelines every year there would be more money in the pot for them to do stuff/employ more people, maybe if they'd got off their s 30/20/10 years ago when opportunity after opprtunity arose, even after RU started getting its act together. Maybe if they'd laid claim to the 'rugby world cup' title so the other lot couldn't use it and all that it helps their game by sole use of such we wouldn't be having an uphill battle.
They're fat, lazy and greedy and always have been, they don't even do the basics such as ensuring the rules of the game are administered on the field of play correctly, they're interested in themselves, they aren't custodians of the game that's for sure.

We the fans are complicit in the ineptitude of the RFL and the actions of some self-serving clubs. Time after time the RFL offer a plate of manure and the fans rub their tummy and say yum yum. We collectively have a huge voice that we never use.

We often talk about innovation in RL, but for every innovation we also have a gimmick. The 8s scenario is a gimmick every day of the week. A tier of complication which makes selling the RL product harder. Even if I thought I could articulate how the 8s work to the uninitiated, I'd frankly be embarrassed to do so. But time after time we meekly accept the absolute gibberish that our governing body bestows upon us. We say nothing, and we do nothing.

The RFL and the clubs certainly need to push the Comms agenda better than they currently are. However there is an element of tosh in the Journalists open letter. The I or the Independent has its own website which is 24/7. Indeed all other papers run websites which all have businesses paying for advertising. It's quite probable that the Independent get more hits on the website each day than papers sold. Though it's pretty dreadful to navigate. I do accept that the length of games is getting silly. I think the Leeds v Leigh first half took 57 minutes to complete with the same in the second half its easily past 10 pm and the press run.

However, I don't accept the whole argument put forward that if games finish after a certain time at night, it's not worth their time. Okay they might not sell a paper but all papers have a website, the more content and relevance of the content the more interest and views your likely to get. Secondly, there are plenty of games in SL still played on a Sunday with a number of clubs keeping this as their main game day. The Independent website, has it covered anything RL since August? Certainly not a match report. I think I managed to find the report (12 Sept) about on Oz player dying after a tackle.

There is a desperate need for the RFL and clubs to feed information in printable format, with images for website and paper format but the printed (and their websites) are not exactly bothered. And I would question how bothered they would be if fed the information.