Nobody said any different, well apart from Souths been top 4, the point was like Falou, Hunt, Rogers, Salior, Tuquri, Willams and Thorn, off the top of my head, their abilities will be/were missed and the comp is of lesser standard because of it.

I disagree, apart from the clubs that lost them where the loss of one of your top players does have an impact, the game itself hardly notices. Even outstanding players have a short peak where they are indisputably the very best, 2 or 3 years, so the passage of time itself will do the job of the yawnion dollars. The next superstar is always waiting to be discovered.

Keeping the game itself watchable and entertaining is a far more important issue for its future. Its sad on individual level that good players are wasting their talents in yawnion but no more than that. You can't polish a turd and the world's finest athletes couldn't make the 6 nations watchable.

But that's my point.

When you say the next superstar is waiting to be discovered would you rather they play with other superstars are bang average players?

Union might be boring to us but more people watch and play it in the world than League.

Logically that makes sense, but the evidence on the ground says otherwise. Six nations crowds tell you that.

For what it's worth, I think it's because the sports fan is attracted to tension at least as much as they are to athletic spectacle. Add a load of other factors to the list too, social occasion, prawn sandwiches, whatever, but people like tense games.

TBH, for all its sins (and I struggle to watch it), Union's scrappiness, slowness, and the high value of penalties, seems to make for reasonably close games a lot of the time, (or with the result often not nailed on for at least for 50 or 60 minutes). I presume a lot of people who enjoy it do so for this reason.

When RL games are good AND close, they can be superb ( e.g. the Eng-NZ semi-final) in a way that I don't think Union can ever match.

Don't underestimate the attraction of sporting tension over the sporting spectacle. Darts anyone?

They know how to put an event on. Unless we learn how to we'll keep falling behind in Europe.

Agree entirely with that. Even a 4th rate nation like Italy can be relatively competitive against the big boys rather than in League where they'd get 60 points shoved up them.
It's why I've been thinking again about the rules and interpretations in League. In the past I've always advocated the view that the attacking team or the "quick" team should get the advantage of any interpretation and I've been on the side of getting rid of scrums etc. But I'm starting to think maybe we should be going the other way and using the rules and interpretations to help even the game up and make it harder for one team to dominate a game or period of a game.

Should we bring back proper scrums?
It'd slow the game down a bit with bigger/heavier/less agile props but would add an extra dimension to game.

Union is brilliantly hyped and marketed, and gets a lot at the big events turning up for everything bar what is performed on the pitch. You can see it with other old boys network events like the Boat Race - how dull is that? What union has done is managed to hang on to the big attendances that were common in many sports up to the 60s by successfully pitching themselves as must go to social events and cultivating a fawning sycophantic press consistently over emphasising its importance. It is exceptionally good at grabbing the corporate dollar, the 6 Nations empitomises this - what other sport could get lavishly sponsored by a bankrupt entity owned by us unwilling taxpayers! I quite understand the coverage given to football, its huge in this country, yet even the blanket coverage it gets is hardly disproportionate.

As for the tension, I don't buy into that too much. By that token a dreadful 0-0 draw should be tense as you know that anyone finally getting it right will win the game and it could possibly, maybe, just happen.

Anyway RL hasn't got to the position where it can be seen as part of the social fabric so it needs to fight to remain as attractive and viewable as possible. It can only do that by concentrating on the game as a whole and not banking everything on individuals. Remember when the NBA was going to take over the world on the back of Michael Jordan? Well Father Time caught up with him and basketball remains a minority sport outside the US.

Isn't Basketball quite a big game in Europe and Asia?

If miles behind the ubiquitous soccer and fighting for the scraps with the rest is considered "quite big" then I suppose you have some point but I can't think of where it is a clear number 2.

Spain, Greece, North Korea?

National sport of Lithuania I believe.

Anyway, is Sam expected to move asap or at the end of the 2014 NRL season? He'd surely have zero chance of making the 2015 WC if it's the latter.

End of the season mate.

Samuel may not be able to convert unless Bath owner Brucie Craig stumps up all the transfer fee. www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/n ... 6824053155

Samuel may not be able to convert unless Bath owner Brucie Craig stumps up all the transfer fee. www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/n ... 6824053155

From that article, if true, Craig has a bob or three so he could afford Sam anyway!

I think in the time it takes to type up the contact and get it signed, Craig will have made the transfer fee in interest alone
Problem is, if he pays the fee, then he "owns" the player and the RFU will have to ask nicely to get their hands on him......