I am all for giving younger players a chance and Wigan have benefited from that but it has to be in the right environment. Simply replacing all quota players with young English players is only going to make the standard and intensity of the competition far worse as in many cases they are no where near as good as the players they are replacing. That is why I think 3 is ideal as it seperates the quality import from those that are no better than English players. Getting rid of quota players completely will in my opinion just result in a similar situation that has been seen in the academy where young players are playing at a fairly pathetic standard with only 3 over age players allowed and the standard has fallen through the floor. The younger players still need to play against better players to improve and get them ready for internationals.

The problem you'll always find with any number of imports be it 1 or 3 or 5, is that they always tend to be the players that take up the creative positions in teams. Hookers, Half BAcks etc...... thats where we fall down. Creativity has always been a problem with GB RL. And anyone with any size as a kid automatically gets taught how to play prop. If Greg Inglis had come from Halifax he'd be doing 20 minute spells for James Graham now.....

no matter what we do we will never compete as long as RL is behind many other sports,even if RL become the no.1 sport in britain it would probibly struggle as britain is not well know to developing finely tuned athletes is it?

There needs to be a 'root and branch' shake up at Red Hall and no more jobs for the boys. When you have people like BJ Mather as Head of Player Development and the woefully inept Dave Rotheram as National Player Development Manager then you get what you deserve.

Obviously this would only work if the top teams kept hold of their academy players, as they never seem to come to much when they've been moved on.

It's about time we had a proper way for young internationals to get used to
Paying international rugby.

Maybe a u19's playing in the European competition, and touring every few years.

Its about all the clubs in SL putting the resources in to develop the next generation of young talent.

Most professional RL clubs pay lip service to developing juniors.

I think St.Helens are an example of a club doing something right on the junior front. For a small town Saints develop a lot of high calibre youngsters.

You would expect that other RL clubs with far larger catchment areas would have far more talent at their disposal. Yet strangely they dont.

The players are out there, they just need to be identified from a young age, then developed to their potential.

I agree entirely.

I'd say only Wigan, St.helens, Warrington, Leeds and Huddersfield are up to a high enough standard.


=#FFFFFFAwaits massive backlash

What can England do to catch up?
Maybe the question should be is it possible to catch up? Remember that RL is more of a majority sport in the southern hemisphere. Whilst our kids are out pretending to be Wayne Rooney in their free time, Aussie kids are trying to emulate Billy Slater or Lockyer (or some RU player or cricketer!). The vast majority of kids in England, outside the very small minority heartland, have no interest in playing RL. It's a minority sport in our country! It's a fact that successful international teams are developed when the sport they are playing is a national game, so Americans produce the best basket-ball and baseball players, European and south american countries produce the best footballers, and Australia produce the best cricketers and rugby players. Yes, there may be occasional exceptions as sport goes through peaks and troughs, but this is the exception and not the rule.
Next, we cannot hope to compete with such an inept coach. Steve McNamara was a failure at club level. If we are happy to let a coach with absolutely no experience of success coach the national team, why on earth would we expect any different?
And finally, put simply, our players are not as good as the Australians or New Zealanders. Australia beat us comfortably without the services of Inglis, Hayne, Falou or Thurston in the backs. We just have to accept that many of our players are nowhere near the level of their opposition.

So does anyone think the RFL will actually do anything? do they here the fans complaints and fears? If they do, do they jsut turn a blind eye and pretend that everything is rosey.

The short term solution is to send more english young players and players in general to the NRL. Though i'd much rather SL kept the top players and worked on becoming a great comp instead of a mediocre one with occasional flashes of brilliance. The RFL should hurry along the culling of foreign player numbers. Not to 0 but to something like 3.

Nothing wrong with top quality aussies or NZers but SL clubs bring over far to many poor players who are just looking for a run around.

My opinion, nothing is wrong with the forward's they can match it with us and the kiwis any day of the week. It's the backs more specificly the centres and wingers. They need to set up an academy to teach them how to defend

Someone else on this forum pointed out recently that including SOO, the Aussies play about 7 representative games a season.

We play...3.

Until we can get competative games from Wales and France, we need another layer above SL for rep games, and that natural model is the County of Origin.

It might be parochial and tied to our northern routes, but if it helps us beat the Aussies, who cares?

Like the licensing system is showing fruit, like the salary cap is showing fruit this too isnt an instant fix and needs a couple of seasons to bed in.

RL in this country has been discarding failed plans because the didnt produce instant results since 1982 and we havent got close to winning yet. What we need is to settle on a BIG plan and stick to it.

The team selected this time was young and untried, now they are tried and tested and whilst having come up short know what its like for next time, know whats needed of them.