The after match interviews should be a laugh, our man of the match for italy Craig gower (followed my a thick Aussie accent).

Bound to give our game world wide instant credibility

Don't know if this ever happened. But if Craig Gower was interviewed after an Italian RU game, did this damage the credibility of Italian RU?? Probably not.

It's not an Australian organization, the administration is Italian, they are just likely to select a lot of heritage players in the squad, and rightly so because it's the World Cup and they want the strongest squad as possible. The biggest problem is that the sport in Italy is in disrepute, similar to the situation in the USA, the majority of domestic players are in a 'rebel' competition that isn't recognized by the official body. I read that they are hoping to have things sorted by the World Cup in order to progress on the back of it so hopefully that can happen and there will be a decent number of domestic Italian players in the squad too, because the 'rebel' competition is a pretty good standard.

Balls to it, the VT way it is........

Oh what a lovely rosey day it is when we can persuade 10 Australians to put A blue shirt on and call them Italy. The italian Public are sure to give the team a lovely homecoming when they come back to Rome as they will be able to connect with the team so much ....... Italia Italia Italia

Apologies for the page still being constructed, but been building up which players are available for each country: www.internationalrugbyleague.net/teamdata.htm Also due to the immense amount of research that's gone into this we might have missed quite a lot, so any feedback or anything to add please don't hesitate in letting me know.

Apologies for the page still being constructed, but been building up which players are available for each country: www.internationalrugbyleague.net/teamdata.htm Also due to the immense amount of research that's gone into this we might have missed quite a lot, so any feedback or anything to add please don't hesitate in letting me know.

Good to hear, hopefully they will get things sorted, as I said perspective is what is needed in relation to this subject , having ' heritage ' players is fine as long as it helps development

I'm not talking poop sir, as I say the homecoming of the Italian (and 10 aussies) rl squad back to Rome will see the streets full of 100,000 people singing Italia Italia Italia Italia

What are you trying to achieve with posts like this? Nobody is claiming the sport is massive in Italy, it has only been there for a few years.

The Italian RU team have easily 50% of their team not native Italians but they are not being pillioried. The England Cricket team is South Africa A but hey that's okay.

The Irish and Scottish teams are likely to be mainly non native born also.

The hope is that these teams including the Italians will have several teams on their roster from the domestic league and that a good performance from the national team will spur more development in the respective countries.

At this point, these national organisations do exist. They have a right to enter the World cup and they played qualifying games to get there. It works at this time to have them represented by the non native born players. Competitive games are so much better than blowouts. Check out the names listed on the Italian roster, most are clearly of Italian pedigree. In future the native born component should increase as the sport grows in the respective countries.

The match I'm most excited for is Tonga v Italy at The Shay. Getting to that one.

Typical RL fans fashion.

We're talking about another potentially competitive international team, yet all some people prefer to do is talk down the game. Why do people want their Len sport to fail so much by holding it to a standard that only football can achieve?

Read my last post on this thread

These lads deserve nothing but praise. They are coming over and playing for free, which compared to the Kangaroos who are expected to get $20,000AUS a test is pretty impressive. They will be a welcome addition to the competition.

It's great to have som many competitive teams.

The RLWC is actually looking like every game is sellable, in 2000 no one would even dream of bothering with a game like Scotland v Italy, but now all of the games look good.

A competitive international game is what we all want, getting players like Minichello, Hayne etc to play for the minnows is a great start, now we have to find a way of making them commit to them so they can build and improve.

If this happens we might actually get somewhere, on a personal note I would love Samoa to meet Tonga in the WC. I think it would be epic.