I'm not in favour of any "made up game" between our very small pool of UK based players. I have seen our support for these games recently & when it has come to the crunch the species don't turn up. It wouldn't work in other similar sports either ... so it's not done. Only games v. OZ, NZ and now Samoa & maybe Tonga will drag a speccies out and that's with all our best players in the team.

I fully get where you are coming from regarding player pool it’s something that really needs to be worked on as a priority, sure Wigan and a couple of other teams are getting some good youngsters coming through now. Also it’s good the likes of Tonga and Samoa are getting stronger.

War of the Roses is pretty much State of Origin and look at how massive that as become now. Now I get we can’t have that overnight but it’s something we should be looking to. But yes right now I agree it won’t work. It doesn’t mean we should just stick it on a shelf, we have to get rid of the loop fixture somehow.

I realise we think we must do something but just occasionally it is just best to do nothing (it seems a bit defeatist I know). State of origin is brilliant but our fan base/player resources are nothing like in Oz and we speccies are so wrapped up in our own clubs.

I agree with Smiffy.

Just putting an extra game or two to clutter the fixture list isn't going to make us more competitive against the Aussies.

We sometimes talk like the Australians are good because State of Origin is such a tough competition. I think its the other way round. The Aussies are so good international competition is too easy for them so they needed to make their own competitive contest, and Origin is it for them.

Fair. But it’s not just fans wrapped up in their own clubs it’s the owners to. There is to much focus on self interest for me. There was another piece written this week regarding changes to promotion and relegation and tbh I just couldn’t be bothered posting it. The actual author of it was pretty fed up I think when reading it. I love this sport dearly, yes I’m a Wire first but a Rugby League fan hence yes I do see a lot as one poster said in reply to something I posted a while back.

The game as massively changed since I went to my first game all the way back to 1970 those of us from that era loved it and I’m guessing some of us still struggle with how it is today. I know it’s had to change and I get that but I’m just worried as a sport in this country we are slowly dying and if we don’t do something it will. I struggle with where you say it’s best to do nothing I think we have long gone past that. The things we have done have just not worked.

Why not have England vs super league clubs.

Yes I get it that some SL clubs would be more affected and weakened than most, but isn’t that why SL clubs have the reserves to deal with player losses.

Warrington vs England would have me buying a ticket, Lancs v Yorkshire wouldn’t.
Is it really much difference than the successful club vs Australia that we had during the touring tests?

Isn’t England vs SL teams a sterner and more financial secure concept than the failed Roses?

Or perhaps England vs a SL club might be too much of a contest

I started watching in the late 80s. In my lifetime watching rugby league, the sport peaked in two eras.

First was mid 90s just before Super League, around the time of that 94 Kangaroos tour. There were legends of the game in both hemispheres. Still my favourite ever time in the game.

Then when Super League came in, there were a few years of disruption especially in Australia, but also a lot of iconic players either retired or went back to rugby union when it turned professional. The standard really fell in the late 90s. But it started to pick up again around the turn of the millennium.

Second peak was mid 00s. It was around the time we had Andrew Johns. The quality of Super League, especially at the top end, was fantastic. There were three absolute powerhouses in Bradford, Saints and Leeds. All of them were big, physical and could play fantastic rugby. I remember thinking then that the sport was really heading in the right direction and Super League / summer rugby had been a fantastic success.

Then there was a steady decline. It was slow at first and for Wire fans we probably got distracted by our era of relative success under Tony Smith. I really started to notice the decline of the game after the great Leeds team broke up and their legends retired one by one. There was nothing really there to replace them. There were well coached teams in Wigan and Saints but the quality of player was way down on what they had before.

This is the longest downward swing that I can remember. For many years RL fans used to complain about the lack of ambition and advertising from the RFL. We used to say that the game was so good it would sell itself, all you needed to do was introduce somebody to it and they would be a fan for life. I don't believe that now and haven't believed it for a long time. It exists really as a part of culture in northern towns and club loyalty is what is keeping it going rather than the great product on the field.

That last paragraph is best I’ve read in a long time, it really sums up where we are and I believe a lot of fans will think the same.

We had Stevo and Eddie telling us it’s the greatest game ever and now Carney and co bigging it up big time but I’m starting to think they do it to keep in a job they really can’t believe it’s that good. But you have got it spot on and it’s painful to admit it. We do get some great games to watch from time to time but a lot of times you walk away thinking what was that.

Just watched the Wire v Wigan match from 88 some of the passing in that game and on that pitch was way better than some of the stuff we see today *sigh*

Sally Cinnamon’s Law is similar to Godwins Law in that any conversation will end up including the Death of Rugby League.

Though I did watch the 88 game the other day and did wonder where our great game had gone.

It's true, RL fans have talked about the death of the game for decades. And there have been times when I feared more for the existence of the game and Wire as a club, than I do now.

I was very uneasy when Super League was first being created. All that talk of mergers. I feared that even if Wire survived being merged at that point, it would be thin end of the wedge and down the line we'd be the "Cheshire Wolves" with Widnes/Saints or whoever. Australia was a mess, with two separate competitions, half the league ineligible to play for the Kangaroos. At Wire for about 7 or 8 years prior to Simon Moran becoming majority shareholder we seemed to be permanently on the edge of financial crisis and going under. The continuing existence of the sport and the club are more secure now than they were back then.

Also for a while after union went professional there was an idea that league and union were locked in a battle from which only one could survive, or there would be an inevitable "merger of the codes". Every time union signed a league player it was seen as a sign that league was losing. This peaked around the time Robinson, Sailor, Rogers, Tuqiri and Harris left. The rugby league press was obsessed with this.

There was a kind of "culture war" in rugby league circles between the populists (too many overseas players here/lets focus on developing our youth/rugby league is a northern sport whats wrong with that/keep Murdoch and his pieces of silver out of our game) and the 'woke internationalists' (its a family sport too much swearing on the terraces/lets expand the game to Oxford/Wales/Scotland/France/Germany / look at all the fantastic global development now they are even playing rugby league in Kazakstan / next world cup should have 48 nations!).

A lot of that debate has lessened now in fact there's a lot less debate about the game in general. It's just grimly continuing along and the older fans can all remember times when the quality of play on the field was much better.

Good post. RL won't die as such but more clubs may become semi-pro. The expansionist zealots seem to have given up. The game seemed to do well under Richard Lewis 2002 - 20012 (he negotiated the best ever TV deal we had). Then we had uninspired inside appointments of Watkins -> Johnson -> Rimmer -> Sutton.

Normally when you say the game was better in the past you get a barrage of "the players couldn't compete with the athletes of today". No doubt fitter now, but better to watch - I don't think so.

Going on from Sally C.

We don’t give enough credit to Peter Higham, of any at all.
He kept the club solvent and ploughed so much of his money in.
He left writing off £1m when the consortium and council came in.
And other board members too wrote off their investment into the club.
I’ve spoke with him at length about Wire.
He is crazy mad about Wire.

To us old duffers it is a shadow of the old game but the current generation seem more interested. Average SL attendance in 2000 (7500 approx) 2024 (9200) - and all games were certainly not on TV in 2000.

Yes there's a danger of looking back at the old days with rose tinted glasses and one thing which wasn't great was the attendances especially in the pre Super League era. The game was carried by a few key derbies and rivalries and you would have excellent atmospheres in games against Wigan, Widnes or Saints. But a lot of the games you'd be shivering in the cold and rain in front of small crowds against Featherstone or Oldham or Barrow.

That first peak era I described in the 90s was based around a very strong international game (albeit of only 3 teams) with all time legends of the game coinciding at the same time, and a powerhouse Wigan team. There were definitely cracks beneath the surface which is why there was momentum behind Super League and summer rugby. I think we'd seen how football had transformed from a hooligan-dominated sport with lots of problems in the late 80s to a Premier League of all seater stadia and international superstars, and hoped Super League would give a similar boost in RL.

To an extent it did, but whereas the Premier League maintained its strength, Super League went on a slow backward slide.

We shouldn't ignore two big economic developments - the strengthening of the Aussie dollar in the late 2000s and the huge increases in TV money in the NRL which meant that we lost our ability to bring in the Jamie Lyons and Matt Kings and created a drag the other way with the best British players signing contracts in the NRL.