taking money from the top of the game wont help.

standards will drop at the top level and we will never get anywhere near as close as we are now. crowds will drop further, money will drop further..etc..

the problem is that RL is a minority sport here, and the number 1 sport in Sydney - the best athletes in Sydney play RL, the best athletes in the UK play football. There is nothing that can be done to address that IMO.

As much as I like the idea of schools being tied to clubs (especially in the Cas area, given that it is arguably the top hotbed of talent in the UK along with Wigan), I don't really see where clubs struggling to make ends meet will find £500k to cut from their budgets.

Points 2, 4 and 5 could be done without taking money out of clubs, and should perhaps be a part of the licence criteria - another tick box under youth development. Possibly put free tickets in for an incentive rather than cash?

TBH the money should be coming from the RFL, not the clubs. It's the RFL's job to maintain and develop the game so it's they who should foot the bill

I keep hearing this but is it really true? We produced world class RL players 30 years ago and Football was just as big in this country as it is now. Also who are these top athletes that play football how many English footballers have ever played RL? And how did we miss out on them? Apart from Giggs

Haven't the RFL just been awarded £30 million from Sport England for grass roots developement?

Nail, head. The fact that kids still play rugby in winter is incredible.

We certainly need the amatuer game to move to the summer. It's so silly that it's still a winter sport.

It would be doing, by not giving clubs all of the Sky money to squander on ageing antipodeans!

If you don't spend significant amounts on Jnr RL then we will never ever get anywhere. it is down to two things, 1. numbers 2. quality of coaching through the age groups

The more players you have the more cream rises and the better chance to find our own Slater or Inglis. We face a battle to entice schoolkids to play RL over soccer. What better way than "sponsoring" schools with significant amounts of money to take up RL and giving them an infrastructure to do it well?

The game has changed completely. no disrespect to the guys who played 30 years ago, but the athletic requirements of players at the top level now are completely different.

we are probably producing the same number of world class players we did in the past - we have never had a team of 1-13 world class superstars.

the Aussies have a freaky number of world class players us at this moment in time. Swap Billy Slater and Greg Inglis with Briscoe and Bridge - and we would be celebrating a 4Nations win now.



thats the point I was making - they never play RL, they never have and never will. There is nothing we can do about the domination of football in this country.

There seems to be a bit of a contradiction here: we can't compete with football because so many kids want to play it, yet we need to change RL to a summer season because kids don't want to play outside in the winter.

I disagree, get schools on board through first of all touch RL then money support and structured school comps and kids will play the game. I played hockey at school. Not because I liked it, not because I wanted to be a hockey player but becasue our PE teacher told us we had to!

Penrith Leagues spends over 300,000 pounds a year on jnr RL in their area, an area similiar in population to Huddersfield. I wonder how much the Giants spend on Jnr RL?

Send them an email.
Rugby league clubs shouldn't be funding school PE lessons. I dont think they'd be able to anyway. Working in partnerships with schools with regard to after school clubs is something that should be looked into though.

That of course assumes that there are 100 schools in Wakey's & Cas' area. Which there are not. More like 14-16ish high schools in the joint area. Pretty much most of which will already run a team in each year group. As it is, I think the involvement of SL clubs in school liaison and the general level of RL coaching in school has improved, although I think it is still rather haphazard rather than systematic.

As for the moving junior rugby to summer, fine at club level. However, it would be hard to synchronise schools rugby with this. You'd be limiting matches to the March-October time, which cuts across two different school years and has huge chunks of time taken out of it by holidays and the examination period (school cricket faces this problem, you end up with an effective season of about 10 weeks and you can't run teams in the last year).

In terms of maximising our player pool, I don't think there is masses of missed potential (i.e. kids with the athletic ability that are lost to other sports) as far as within areas where league is dominant. My experience within these areas suggests that the majority of kids who have the ability get into the game. The wider issue is broadening the base to areas that are beyond the heartlands. What seems to be an issue with some is developing from school age to beyond; far too many who have the potential don't seem to have the real commitment/aren't 'looked after' in the right way and so fall by the way side.

The game has moved on, but the core skills of a good RL player haven't changed that much, you still needed to be able to kick, and pass accuratly, to know how to run a good line, know how to offload in the tackle, but for some reason even our top players are lacking in this department.

Aaraon Ramsey was scouted by Saints IIRC