Except most people outside of Leeds, Wigan etc aren't particularly going to care about Leeds or Wigan.

The problem with going down the club route is that our clubs are northern. And the media doesn't give a toss about anything north of Watford.

England, on the other hand, when played at a decent stadium in London attracts attention.

And nice red wine too

Eng v Fiji sold out the KC. NZ v Samoa sold out the halliwell jones.

I think a four nations between Eng, France, NZ and Samoa would go well and be a success.

The attendances that mention were for world cup fixtures and it may be difficult to replicate these in a 4 nations comp.

As we are now, we should probably try and alternate test series with NZ and Aus in alternate years and work like hell at trying to help the "smaller" nations improve.
This probably means someone digging into the ancestors of players in England and Aus and trying to find Scots, Irish, Welsh etc in their grand parents

Personally I think we need to concentrate on Wales and France in the short to medium term.
I think we need a big effort to get development of Welsh and French players and get them into the Championship and eventually SL.

I don't really know much about how player development is going in Wales. Are they one of the regional academies? Am I right in saying Catalans have recently just started their u19 academy?

If we can develop 15 SL standard Welshmen and 15 SL standard Frenchmen then their national sides should be competitive.

I think there's potential for both nations but they need assistance, the players need a pathway to full time RL and the national sides need regular games v England and a set international schedule.

Halliwell Jones holds 11k hardly a huge crowd on which to build a stable international game - Leeds Rhinos haven't had a crowd that small for years.

Are all the games against NZ sold out? so what makes you think a SSI country will be as big a draw as NZ?- crowds for a series of that nature would be pitiful - how many turned up at LSV on Saturday even at £10 a ticket - the international game is not where RL has strength. It is very likely the WCC game Leeds v North Queensland would draw a bigger crowd than any of the 3 internationals if it were played at Elland Rd.

The exiles would produce a better series than either France or Wales - I think the would actually beat England.

Halliwell Jones holds 15k

This discussion ignores the nature of the two games. RL is generally far more unforgiving on the scoreboard when a 'better' team plays a 'weaker' one. There is no place to hide. You cannot aim for scrums, lineouts and penalties and starve the opposition of possession. You score a penalty, you give the ball back for 6 tackles. Against Australia just one set is quite possible to lead to a try against minnows even when starting from their own line.

If the sport wants to become genuinely more competitive across a bigger range of countries we'd have to look at bringing back genuine contests for possession - stripping the ball, allowing tacklers to strike at the PTB, not to mention proper scrums.

This simply won't happen because this isn't what RL is nowadays - contests for possession have been removed to make the game faster and cleaner. Which is fine when teams are relatively evenly matched but a fatal flaw when they're not.

Agree with that. I think for a thriving future of the sport we have to go back and reintroduce some of the elements we got rid, even if only in a very mild fashion.

I'd have proper scrums. I totally understand people being against this but I don't think it'd turn into Union style scrums (which have been hugely cleaned up in the last year or so) and I think they'd genuinely give "lesser" teams another chance at competing. Get some tackle-hungry backrowers and a couple of big props and a good kicking half back and suddenly a team has a way of making a better opposition have to work. Because the lesser team can kick downfield and then potentially win the scrum.

Smokey had some decent suggestions on a previous thread of possibly changing the 40-20 to a 30-30 or changing the game to 4 quarters instead of 2 halves.

I'm not advocating going back to rucks, mauls and lineouts but just a few ways to help teams compete.

Television coverage for the european championship would be a good start. Lot's of emerging amateur nations taken up the game in recent years e.g sweden, norway

I don't think I could stand the 'Feeding' thread after every round, repeated VR of the SH putting the ball in the scrum, Stevo ranting on endlessly, another reason for the Pies to scream persecution. Stats showing how they had lost 56.8% of scrums with Bentham in charge. No thanks.

Those of us who remember vividly the days of the specialist hooker whose job it was to trundle from scrum to scrum winning possession, usually by sticking their legs outside those of the open side prop and flailing wildly at the ball so it came back out of the tunnel three or four times before the game got under way again, say no thanks to the return of "contested" scrums.

Why "go back" to something? Why not "move forward" to a contested scrum unlike we've seen before.

oh ffs. Nothing, lots of wealthy ppl have bn playing RU for yrs in Argentina. They've got a lot of good players who get transferred abroad to play professionally, same with Georgia, although Georgia are still behind Argentina obviously in terms of development.

We're in competition with soccer for fans, they're the fans we should be targeting, as G Hetherington has said, we can forget about getting people with good degrees to follow our sport, it's not gonna happen, possibly ever. I've always bn in favour of negative marketing, we should be putting soccer down, I think soccer is a stupid game and we should be telling people that.

RU have contested scrums - how often does it resort in a different result to RL scrums? The contested part of RU revolves around who can get penalty at the scrum rather than setting up for a sparkling threequarter play. Is that what we want in our game?

I would continue with the scrums as we have but the 12 players in the scrum cannot get involved in play 1 i.e. 7 against 7 for one play.