I just read Underhill's comments on the BBC website responding to England R.U's performance against the Welsh.

" If you don't like scrums & line outs go watch Rugby League"!. Isn't a comment like this a great opportunity for our sports marketing team to get a hold of and push to a new audience?

I take your point, but I think one target audience is the number of fans we may have lost over the decade.

Not particularly mathematically accurate but Superleague nearly hit an average of 10,000 fans a game and that has dropped towards 8,000. So I think we can get a lot of old fans back and get a few more new fans in across the target audience.

It may help if the big clubs didn't keep wanting to have an edge by the marquee allowance, but that's maybe another debate. But if the current rules proved to be popular across our audiences, returning lapsed fans and bringing in new ones would be blooming marvellous.

What I have no time at all for is any of these pie in the SKY (no pun intended) ideas that some people have that people will see this new type of game and the World will all suddenly be playing and watching Rugby league to the exclusion of every other sport going. If this is the way to modernise the dinosaur of Rugby and make it more attractive and profitable then market forces will force Union to follow anyway (slowly bit by bit) no matter what their purists say.

When Union got rid of the maul which was an orgy without the sex, and the ball was simply recycled they did their game a massive favour to be fair.

Just get some of the fans back we've lost Donny as you say. Most of the fans I know blame the constant structure changes for that though which is another topic for another day

I don't believe that, I know its a sport played nationwide unlike league. I said 'some folk' believe union is a southern sport.

Err, unless I've misunderstood the thread, Rugby League is played nationwide. You seem to be comparing professional Rugby League with amateur and Professional Rugby Union.

I don’t know why people bother comparing the two games.

RU won the battle when they won the 2000 WC. They so capitalised on it and never looked back and now dwarf RL.

We are more akin to Ice hockey now in the publics mind, there is definitely only one Rugby outside the heartland, sorry but it’s basically true if a little exaggerated.