Until there is a minimum & Maximum salary cap limit there will always be hammerings in Super League. One thing about the NRL is you see much closer games and they dont have a NFL like style draft system.

well said can do without idiotic posts like that , cullen gave 20 years service to the wire

Too many teams don't spend to the cap and the coaching is awful.

It was the Wire chairman who changed everything for them. Paul Cullen was never going to take them to the heights they are at now. The chairman was the instigator.

I'm not on about league positions, challenge cups im on about when he was still playing and doing alot of work behind the scenes in the office and stuff, he was the one who got the wolfpack season tickets going also he was the one who got the ball rolling with us changing to Wolves.

The NRL has two advantages - a far bigger and better pool of players and the fact that most teams spend close to the cap. David Gallop (NRL CEO) said that some SL teams only spend around 30% of the cap. Its not surprising that a team that can only afford to spend a third of the amount of other clubs will struggle to have any depth or quality in their squad.

And what did he get at the end?

Loads of abuse

I'd rather have SL cut down to a league on 10 or 12. Or possibly have the Super League as a 10 Club league, and then the league below that being another 10 club league.

So, say, a SL comprising of

Wigan, Warrington, Saints, Catalans, Hudds, Cas, Leeds, Hull FC, Hull KR, Bradford

and then a league below with

Salford, Wakefield, Quins, Widnes, Halifax, Fev, Barrow, Leigh, Crusaders (if they've gotten themselves sorted) and 1 other.

You could then maybe get a 1-for-1 promotion/relegation between these two leagues, or stick with the franchise system.

It would also have other benefits - 2nd league teams have something more realistic to aim for, the quality of players in these leagues should improve, and it's better for the player's health as they're playing less games per season, amongst other things that I can't explain coherently at 2.30am.

It's more to do with the changing nature of RL I think. Small differences in the teams can mean big points.

Much as it pains me, take Huddersfield. On form capable of beating anyone, and topping the league but have had off days where they shipped 30+ points against they might have expected to deal with "easily"

It's become a truism that RL is a game of inches, maybe even millimetres. If one team has it's calibration off by a smidge then they can easily concede points, and how often do we see halftime leads of 18 or 20 points over turned?

I wouldn't mind seeing a bonus point for close games, since many many times a very close game has been decided by a contentious call or miracle bounce of the ball.

Rugby League (in particular in the summer era with fast pitches etc) is a sport that will always have lob sided score lines. It simply isn’t a sport where a team can play for a draw or keep the score down

In football, a team can put 10 or 11 men behind the ball and a clearly inferior side can achieve a 0-0 or lose by a small margin. In RU, the laws of the game allow for negative tactics – i.e. removing the ball from the pitch on a regular basis and slow the play down. But in League, this can’t happen – one team doesn’t have to be better by too much to get 20 or 30 points on their opponents... it is a sport where it is very difficult to be defensively minded

The first half of this season was as competitive as I have seen for a long time with a lot of upset wins. It is fair to say that the teams with the larger (more depth in quality) have come to the fore in the second half of the season but that is to be expected and we are in continuous development not overnight change

RL is a momentum sport. If it see-saws back and forth it makes for a compelling spectacle. But you do sometimes see games when one teams dominance, particularly in terms of weight of possession, becomes almost self-perpetuating, as the opposition tire and penalties mount.

As a supporter of a team that has played big chunks of the game without the ball this season, team-that-scores-kicks-off appeals.

In the same period (of 3 weeks), the NRL has produced only 3/24 games where a team has been hammered (assuming 30 points is a hammering and 2 of those games the points difference was EXACTLY 30) and in only 2/24 games has a team scored more than 40.

That's because the NRL is incredibly tedious.

And it is the even competition that the NRL demonstrates that we are striving towards - the Australian system (without P&R funnily enough) has allowed teams to develop their squads for the last several decades and build programmes of development for the future without the need for overnight fixes

Our league is more even than it has been but we are not there yet... hence my point below which you conveniently left out of your quote