SL has never had top quality players but you could at least guarantee a fast free flowing game but the slow PTB has killed that now. Phil Clarke says in the long run it will make players better as they'll need more skill to be able to break down the set defences.

A contributing factor to the slow play the ball is strangely a higher level of fitness. Cats got 3 players in the tackle last night which gains seconds. Hudds have done it all season where 2 tackle the player and hold him up then a third joins who lies on the other 2 tacklers as they go to ground. Thats coaches coaching to the rules-both, interestingly Aussies.
Having watched Quins all year you get used to boring % rugby. The second half of the season particularly we resorted to it and it didn't work- You need decent players to make it work. The better team ie Saints/Leeds play a balanced game.

I think the game is going through a transition at the moment from lots of Aussies to fewer, whilst being replaced with young British players. Hopefully once the transition finishes and the British player get better(older) the game will pick up.

I think he's not the only one with a massive chip on his shoulder.

Like it or hate it, the Super League competition is divided into two halves - the league part then the knockout part

The problem with the first season of the top 8 system is that the first two rounds have (so far) not had the intensity or quality we should expect of the end of season finale

A couple of reasons for this - firstly, with teams finishing below half way on the league ladder in the playoffs, we have to expect they won't immediately jump two or three levels in quality overnight.... otherwise, why did they finish in the bottom half? Having said that, Catalans are showing that if you time your run right, either through luck or judgement, you can make a decent run

Then you have the 'second chance' influence - Hudds and HKR knew that they weren't out if they lost to Saints/Leeds so I don't think that breeds intensity

I hope the game tonight will be high quality and then there is next week when it is proper semi-final football where the intensity should be top notch

Maybe the playoffs are simply one week too long

This. Everyone who thought that there wouldn't be enough decent players for 14 teams before the expansion, give yourself a big pat on the back.

Presumably they are hoping that the added teams (Salford and Crusaders) will be able to develop new youngsters that will fill the gap. This seems a bit unlikely in Salford- there are plenty of other teams around there who could take a young player on, so I don't think having Salford in SL adds much from a player point of view.

The Crusaders this year have been a non-stop disaster, but even in a best case scenario, I'd doubt you'd be seeing new players coming off the production line straight away.



This too. I think this season gives the lie to the idea that there are thousands of say Wakefield and Huddersfield supporters who will turn up if they feel their team has got a chance of winning something. If you level out all of the teams all it does is reduce the crowds at the best supported teams.

Plus it allows our best players to escape, or possibly not take up the game as a career in the first place if they feel they can't earn top money doing it.



Not so sure about this though.

I can't agree with the Salary Cap comment - it isn't there to grow the supportor base, it's there to protect the clubs from themselves

Without the Salary Cap, Dave Whelen would have bought the Super League title 5 years ago and several other clubs would have gone bust trying to keep up...

I'm not against the cap. I'd raise the salary cap to £2.5m .

That would stop the big teams buying all of the good players and then buying all of the second best players and keeping them on the bench, and then buying all of the third best players and using them to make the tea (what used to be known in Soccer as doing a Chelsea, until the bonkers Arabs showed up). But it would still allow the best supported teams to field the best teams on the pitch, whilst still giving the lower teams the chance to build. It would also protect the clubs from themselves, as you rightly point out.

There has been a lot of emphasis on "won't it be great when all of the teams are spending the full cap"- well, it isn't necessarily so.

The thing is that we [idid[/i get close. As dire as we were this season, we were in with a shout of scraping into the playoffs right up until 2/3 games from the end of the season. And with even a small amount of luck in a couple of games we actually would have made it.

That can't be a good thing, surely?

Agree with the first part, but not sure how scrapping relegation has an impact on the quality of the playoff games.

Quite right. Imagine how tight it would have been this year with only 12 teams. I'm more concerned though about the slowing of the PTB down but only because it's out of sync with the NRL. We need to operate at the same speed across all competitions. It's ludicrous that the two premier competitions in our sport operate on different rule interpretations. It just shows how insular the Australians are when it comes to RL. They're Jodie Marsh to the Americans Jordan.

When you're the best, you don't adapt to copy what the rest are doing.

The thing is whether it's a fast ptb, or a slow ptb - we can't play it to anything like the standard they do down under anyway.

Still, as long as the league is close, and we can blame anyone else from the refs to the Aussies for our failings - who really cares if the product is sub-standard?

To me, the first year of franchise was always going to have a lower skill level, simply because the top players of 12 clubs are now split between 14. Obviously the level of play has to go down because we can't find top players to fill the gaps overnight.
The + side has already been seen, all clubs finding new SL quality players this year, players who will be even better next year. Give gthe debutants an off-season and if they improve as much as the Catalans players improved between year 1 & 2 then we will see an incredible 14 team league next year, with the bonus being felt by the national squads.

Totally agree withall these comments,also a couple of weeks ago i got slated on here for saying that the quality of rugby this season has been very poor IMO.

I'm not sure if i've any justifiacation in saying this, but IMO some of the traditionally "bigger" sides- warrington, bradford and Hull failing to make the playoffs have hampered it's impact this year. Although the league table doesn't lie, and certainly no-one has a right to be there, these team are more likely to bring a larger travelling fanbase then catalans, hudds and wakey, creating atmosphere adding to the intensity.

I'm sure someone will prove me wrong with average crowd data etc but as a leeds fan- playing eg bradford in the semi would fill me with more excitement then some of the other teams.

IMO of course

At least you're an honest pom.