Was hardly as high profile as the Auckland 9's....

1. The organisers have made no bones about presenting this as an alternative to the Wellington 7's. Expect "sold out" signs erected but swathes of empty seats due to 38,000 of the 44,000 attendance being at the bar dressed as super friggin Mario brothers or the Von Trapp family!
2. Holidays here are 30 days + over Christmas. Imagine if you in France/America...(shall we call it Canada?) had your summer holidays and Xmas all at once! People leave work about the 20th of December and are not back until Feb......nobody will be interested in rushing back from the "bach" in mid January to watch Gareth Hock take someones head off.....

No. The Magic weekend should be replaced by a 9's tournament over two days to take it out of the regular season and give us a different spectacle to watch.

Thoughts:
1) Regular randomly drawn knockout competition
2) Mini-league, one or two games per team (40mins per game) with highest points winer.
3) Rules to entourage fringe players to get a game
4) And why not, winner of the comp to play the antipodean winners at a later date. Who wouldn't mind a good game around the Christmas period for example? It's not like Boxing day is the same anymore.

This is to promote the NRL, do you think they give a about uk clubs on this?

I doubt they do care, it's my main gripe with Australia, they have so much power to change this sport for the better and they simply couldn't give a fk, maintaining the status quo keeps them as the top team/league and I think that's how they want to keep it.

Lets not forget though for many years, SL clubs could out price both RU and NRL.

But a lot of money has been wasted in both heartland and expansion clubs.

Power to change and having more MONEY are not alway mutually exclusive.

could they maybe send over a superleague invitational side to take part rather than specific club sides? that way just one or two players from each club are involved. sevens and nines events often work like this with a mix of club, invitational, and national teams

i'm sure we can have fun trying to select such a side....

The Auckland 9's is to promote the NRL in NZ. There's nothing stopping the RFL from hosting a a Nines comp in the UK/France/etc...



The NRL's outright aim is to be the NBA of rugby (it already is for most people but...). Aside from spreading premiership matches to every state&territory in Australia they're playing exhibition tournaments to grow the game in NZ, funding internationals for the pacific nations, talking about playing State of Origin in London and yet some poms are ed because they didn't invite some cash-strapped SL clubs to the other side of the world to compete in a 9's comp.

Is there something in the water in the UK that makes you such miserable people?

I don't care about an invite to a 9's comp, my gripe with Australia is the international game and how I feel they've held it back, their almost union like arrogance of blocking players who dared to leave the NRL from playing rep rugby.

Sounds good. I'd say 4 teams would be a good call, preferably the CC winner and SL champs along with two invitational picks - one of which I'd make Catalan, to give the frenchies some interest, and a team like Salford, who've spent big in the offseason.

I don't think that's entirely true.

I had to laugh the other day reading how sl chairman and coaches are ed off with nrl clubs stealing their best talent, you couldn't make it up.

The Aussies want to grow the game in order that they can dominate the other sports in Australia, but they take the routes where success is more likely.
Recently, I reckon working with the RFL (who couldn't even raise a sponsor for the Super League) will have felt like running in treacle and a much less worth while operation than, say, using SOO to gain a bigger audience.
Since the World Cup, however, I would have thought that the Aussies will see the International scene has some legs and that interaction between rugby associations can really bear fruit. The stronger SL and England are, the better for Australia, as the more interesting competition they could have and the extra spectacles available, but in previous years we've failed to hold up our end and be competitive.
The Aukland 9s sounds like a good way to mix things up and gain interest from people who aren't weekly fans.