My Wife got me into Rugby League when we started dating. Before meeting her I'd never taken an interest. She'd watched almost from birth.

Yet the number of conversations we got in where other male supporters would ignore her and try to get my opinion was embarrassing quite frankly. Her knowledge of the sport was vastly greater than mine but simply because she was a woman is was almost like she couldn't possibly have a valuable opinion.

Unfortunately another area the sport is stuck in the past, Just like the OP it seems.

I actually think Sky are doing a great thing here to try and improve the image for once.

Well she was the only one that realised it was a shoulder charge on Sneyd. The others completely missed it, even on a couple of replays. In fact, Jon Wells was banging on about how good a tackle it was!

Yeah, guesswork has gotten him a lot of gig at universities and on TV.
I find the guy quite irritating, but I definitely wouldn't question his knowledge, especially based on such a poor reason.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/ ... staff-told It's a sad state of affairs when women struggle to get employment on sports channels and this scumbag was in a job for so long

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/ ... staff-told It's a sad state of affairs when women struggle to get employment on sports channels and this scumbag was in a job for so long

Great insight as usual bazza

A number of years ago I had the leisure to watch a lot of one of the women's Union World Cup tournaments. The quality was awful and the skill levels similar to the U14s boys team that I was coaching. Every tournament since then has seen a steady and strong improvement in the quality as the number of players has increased and I now enjoy and even look forward to watching games. Women's Rugby League is still some way behind in terms of participation and structure but that will come with time. Opportunities to officiate will become more common and the number of personalities available for commentary will increase. At the moment there are few top class female commentators in RL but there are also few top class male ones either. Rather than employing good commentators, like Claire Balding, we limit ourselves to a pool of ex-players with little media ability. All around the world broadcasters are taking the opportunities that using the best figure heads of either sex offer. Canal Plus in France has a fabulous female RU presenter heading up their coverage who certainly brings knowledge and style to a line up of otherwise hairy blokes. Barry McDermot is not going to widen our appeal.