Motu Tony is another who has gone from player to management. He studied business when he retired and is now Hull FC general manager.

Young guy playing reserve grade at the Newcastle Knights will probably be a big wig someday.

Lachlan Fitzgibbon is a 21 year old who is in his 3rd year at Uni.

His father, Mark Fitzgibbon, is CEO of NIB Insurance, a top 150 company in Australia and major sponsor of the Newcastle Knights. Mark is seen as a rising star of Australian business.

His uncle, Joel Fitzgibbon, is a Labor member of federal parliament and was defence minister and then government whip in the last Labor government. He was also a handy League player when young, playing for the Cessnock Goannas.

Lachlan is a very good, big, barnstorming second rower who will probably play firstgrade next year, if he doesn't decide he can make more money in business.

The Aussies are just light years ahead of us in picking out interesting characters for TV. Matthew Johns was a great example until everything kind of turned sour. Beau Ryan is another example of an archetype which is completely alien to SKY TV. As for the Beeb - it's so sour-faced and serious you kind of wonder whether anyone there possesses a sense of humour.

I mean, Barrie and Terry take a stab at the task in their own amateur-night way. But you just can't compare either with Johns or Beau Ryan.

Crabtree for a start. He's awful.

He's the worst of the bunch, god he comes across as a right bumpkin. I feel embarrassed every time he's on...gives the people who stereo type our game proper fuel for the fire.

I thought the BBC coverage of the cup games so far was great. Discussed the games and issues with professionalism and with some humour.

Sky, with the exception of Wells & Carney (and the odd bit from Clarke when he's actually thinking), is really bad. Eddie would be fine if he just stuck to commentary, but he doesn't. Stevo's time as a commentator has been and gone, he adds nothing but confusion (is better talking about the game in general like on Backchat). Barrie occasionally has a decent comment but is still too obsessed with being a prop and shouting things like "shot!" when there's been a good hit.
Terry is terrible. Utterly awful. Can't speak well enough for TV. Doesn't add anything anyone didn't already know but says it in a voice as though it's the most wonderful thing he's ever seen in his life. A random cliche generator.

I actually like all the people on Sky. They're all die hard RL fans and love the sport and just want the best for it. But some their time has come, others should never have been on so regularly in the first place.

The BBC's live coverage is far better than Sky's in my opinion. Partly because of the better people on it and partly because there is fewer of them and they aren't talking over the top of each other, bickering etc.

However the SL show is in stark contrast to the BBC's live coverage. The SL show is incredibly dull and boring. For some reason they're insistent on having current players or coaches on. Which means you only ever get neutral answers from them as they don't want to upset rivals.
There's no analysis of any of the games. Just a few standard "team who won played well" & "team who lost struggled" comments.
I'm a pretty die-hard RL fan and I struggle to watch it most weeks due to the utterly boring nature of it.

We don't actually need the current players to be THAT media savvy/friendly just enough to get through post match interviews.
What we need are ex-players and coaches to be used.

I would like to see JJB on a commentary team after he's finished playing.

Good use of sarcasm, I hope

JJB's accent is so thick, and his slurring of words so grotesque,, that he makes Peacock seem intelligible.

I'm not sure what's funnier, complaining about "very broad parochial accents" yet then listing a dozen AUSSIES as examples of .. what -not broad parochial accents?? Arrr, strewth, moaite. Or highlighting a "chartered accountant" as if that was bizarrely some indicator of interestingness. Have you ever met one?

Michael Shenton's good.

I seem to remember Jordan Hamea being good for the camera.

What's this obsession with regional accents all about? Are you ashamed of your cultural heritage? Would you rather have players with broad accents locked in the basement like a disfigured child whilst their "intelligent" colleagues represent a predominantly northern sport in sterile, colourless and completely unrepresentative "BBC articulation"?

Seriously, it sounds like you've swallowed one too many bitter jibes served up by the establishment hacks from down south.

The human brain is remarkably good at unraveling the twists and turns of accented speech and ordering it into coherency. If it weren't mankind would doubtless have ended up as just another unremarkable branch of the ever-widening evolutionary tree. This is the reason a film such as "Trainspotting" featuring thick Glaswegian accents can become an international box-office success.

If people living in far-flung locations such as Queensland, Idaho, Quebec and Durban can sit in their local theaters and make sense of Trainspotting I very much doubt people living in the UK watching SKY or the Beeb find the likes of JJB indecipherable and switch off in total disgust.

No, I think the REAL issue here has little to do with highfalutin notions of "casting RL in the best possible light" (which is at best unrepresentative and at worst - downright deception) and is instead far closer to battered child syndrome. At some point in your life you've been the victim of cultural snobbery. So in true if-you-can't-beat'em-join-'em spirit you've decided to become a snob yourself.

They say the first step to recovery is admitting your problem. Learn to be comfortable in your own skin.

The irony in the OP implying that articulation is representative of intelligence.

Implicit within such a ridiculous generalisation is the OP's total lack of intelligence.

Your statement says a lot more about you than JJB's accent does about him....