FORUMS > The Virtual Terrace > Why is Union more popular ? |
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| Historically RU was a player friendly sport (not as much in the way of aggressive tackling, much slower pace to the game). This meant many could play the game without there being a heighten risk of injury and fitness levels did not have to be that high.Many would play into their 50's given the relative gentleness of the sport. RU was as much about the social scene as much as the sport itself.
RL was developed from the need to be a spectator friendly sport to generate the incomes for a professional era, meaning only he fittest, fastest and most creative would get noticed.
Sadly, RL did not spread the word in the early years and concentrated too much on the heartlands.
In those early years RU would openly discriminate and stigmatise those who played RL or even thought of playing RL. As RU was participated in and followed socially by the professional and employers (and southern based media), they held power of the masses. RL was, in those early years played by those from the work houses.
Role forward 100 year, the (incorrely) stigma of playing RL from the RU authorities eventually was lifted, but the masses still pay only lip service to it.
I challenged someone recently who stated about Burgess "RL are welcome to him, as RL is a s**t game anyway". When I asked what he thought it was that was "s**t" the reply was simply...
"always has been, thats what we got told at school by PE teachers, anyway look at the 6 nations and the attendances, RL doesn't compare"
Or put another way, generations of ignorance followed up with a dose of "not really anything about the sport, but because loads watch it, it must be better".
Thats what RL is fighting against.
I suppose the laughable part of it all is that RL has Nigel Wood doing the fighting!
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| Apart from Mr Larder, from memory, all the teachers in Oldham in the late 70's/80's were union players or trained(or interested football coaches) but most ran very capable RL teams.
We forget that Rugby league, though a passion to many on here, is one of a large set of choices of entertainment. It's a crowded market out there and we still display the image of the handcart selling hotdogs whilst football and Union are now the designer clothing booths. It's not easy to shake the image off but it can be done... football's image in the early 80's stank and look at it now.
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| Quote: Hillbilly_Red "Apart from Mr Larder, from memory, all the teachers in Oldham in the late 70's/80's were union players or trained(or interested football coaches) but most ran very capable RL teams.
We forget that Rugby league, though a passion to many on here, is one of a large set of choices of entertainment. It's a crowded market out there and we still display the image of the handcart selling hotdogs whilst football and Union are now the designer clothing booths. It's not easy to shake the image off but it can be done... football's image in the early 80's stank and look at it now.'"
Good point about teachers I went to an RU school in Salford in the 70's and had the 'pleasure' of being reffed by the one eyed Fran Cotton an RU star who's da played RL I think was a teacher or coach at Leigh GS? Your own Keith Fielding was a teacher at Marple High School as well as being a Superstar
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| Quote: Hillbilly_Red " football's image in the early 80's stank and look at it now.'"
Football had an image problem, but it was still the dominant sport at both professional and amateur levels.
Part of RU's recent success has been sustained change to make it more attractive to spectators, it could probably do more (and probably will as there are still dead weight aspects from the amateur era), it just has to slowly win over the purists who are nostalgic for the days of seriously unfit players rolling around in mud with a try being scored once every other week. As they die out they'll be able to cut more of that dead weight out. With RL a lot of that ground was covered a long time ago and now it's just tinkering, occasionally it works like the 40/20, other times it is so so, like changing replacement rules or kick restarts or when the ball is classed dead in goal. We're not looking at some parts of RL that have become frustrating like the way that the interpretation of the forward pass favours generic flat attack and every other pass is borderline forward, the interpretation of the knock on that has become a de-facto fumble rule so rather than a player having to recover the ball from behind them when they knock it [ibackwards[/i, which might create a bit of excitement, a knock forward is given and the players instinct is to make the ball dead as quickly as possible. Scrums are a farce, I'd personally like to see a return to RL style contested scrums (which are not the same as the RU form which have had their own problems), but the current approach simply bunches together 12 random players for thirty seconds.
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| Interesting answers, but to have my two pence worth. Although born & brought up 8 miles from Hull I never had the chance to play league at school while my cousins played League in primary school. I had only soccer. Up till WW2 Beverley had a league club & very successful at amateur level. Once at secondary (1960) I was introduced to Union & played until mid 20,s (when banned for training with a Pro League club) It is interesting to note that Beverley did not have a Union side until the late 1950’s & that was originally my schools old boys. Also worth remembering that the great expansion of Union happened also in the late 1950’s early 1960,s. The reason the post war boom in secondary education when thousands of new teachers were trained at new teacher training collages that based their training & ethos on public schooling traditions. That is what led to Union getting its foot in state schools & the new collages across great swathes of the UK. Union until 1995 was more about participating than watching. I played county level when maybe only a couple of hundred would be there.
Even playing international in the Far East we only got a couple of thousand. It has been the international game with a fixed position in the social calendar that has pushed Union onwards & they have reaped the rewards of TV cash & having built up huge cash reserves from gate money during the pre professional era. As a League fan I can only wish our sport would work for the game & not club loyalties. The one chance we have I think is that Union is becoming to specialised & the average guy is finding that unless they are giants or 20 stone monsters they can't play some positions. At the lower levels League is easier to learn & play. The armed forces are finding that League is a lot better for smaller units as finding enough players of the right build to play some positions is difficult. I also think a lot prefer our game once they have a go & that is the key to getting the word out.
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| I got an email in my inbox today asking if I was interested in England v France Six Nations ticket at £250 (+VAT!) a pop.
Hey, maybe it's like diamonds and mink coats: the more you keep the price artificially high, the more you please the punters cos they don't want it to be cheap and accessible to every Tom, Dick, and Harry.
I feel much as Nye Bevan did about Tories.
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