You can watch a livestream of the Hunters V Easts game from 3pm Sydney/5am London time tomorrow. www.qrl.com.au/interactive/live-stream.html It should be interesting to see how the PNG forwards cope with Giant Melbourne Storm prop Mitch Garbutt.

You can watch a livestream of the Hunters V Easts game from 3pm Sydney/5am London time tomorrow. www.qrl.com.au/interactive/live-stream.html It should be interesting to see how the PNG forwards cope with Giant Melbourne Storm prop Mitch Garbutt.

Video highlights of the 20 all draw with Easts Tigers here; www.qrl.com.au/news/2014/03/31/r ... v_png.html Some good long range tries by the Hunters.

Video highlights of the 20 all draw with Easts Tigers here; www.qrl.com.au/news/2014/03/31/r ... v_png.html Some good long range tries by the Hunters.

Which is why it's a mystery to me why all these SL clubs are partnering with American RL clubs who play a tiny season with sportsmen from other games. France and PNG actually have proper RL clubs and bags of untapped talent.

I suspect that if several Super League and NRL clubs between them bought up all the talent in the PNG Hunters team for Super League 2015, the Hunters would not be too hard done by. They would still be able to recruit new talent and replace the lost players easily and field a team just as good as the current one in 2015. I suspect that NRL scouts are on the lookout at the Hunters team already, but SL clubs not.

We should also remember that a talented French teenager named Theo Fages came to Britain on his own initiative, not because Salford had scouted him.

It just requires a bit of initiative from Super League clubs' managements to see that scouting France and PNG is one new way to go to improve the SL talent pool.

If you scout the French Elite leagues you'll see that a great many of the "stars" in that comp are actually 3rd grade ANZAC/PI players. BTW, calling it the Elite comp doesn't make it Elite....kind of like the not-so-superleague
As for PNG. The Hunters are 100% full time professional players that walk, talk, sleep, eat and train with each other 24/7/52. Them being competitive in a lower tier comp where the other teams are part timers is hardly proof that SL management need to look at PNG for anything.....they recently saw the cream of both French and PNG talent here in Europe.......remind us all again how they got on?

France scored 3 tries in 4 games...Ireland scored 3 tries in 1 game!...Catalans and the Elite (sic) comp have repeatedly failed to deliver top tier talent.....and before you go on about a French player at Salford, I said top tier......not outside the play-offs.

PNG scored 5 in 3 games. The gazzillions of players they have delivered one of the worst teams at the RLWC, if not the worst.

Tonga, Samoa and Fiji offer far more in the way of talented players on the fringes of being first grade.

The Hunters are only 3 months into this experiment.
They are putting some of the young talent in PNG into fulltime training and have $200k worth of gym equipment, free accommodation and all the food supliments supplied, so for the last 3 months these guys have been getting pretty much everything young Australian and English players have been getting, and they are also playing at a standard equal to or higher than the under 20s comp in Australia. They have some older guys, but they are concentrating on giving young players a chance to impress.
3 months in most of these young guys have shown they can compete against many players who have NRL experience and they can only keep improving.

Just to question a couple of your points as you prove that if you say things confidently people may actually listen to you.

1. Name ALL these French players who have played in the NRL? It's just that I look forward to seeing Casty playing for Newtown in a few weeks time as I watched Gigot play reserve grade for the Sharks last year before he WALKED OUT on them.

2. Was Akuila Uate plucked from the fiji's amateur comp to play in the NRL? I can tell you now the correct answer isn't the one you gave. He moved to oz in his teens as was playing on the central coast when spotted. Oh and Sisi Waqa came over to Sydney and played Rugby UNION for Gordon. Not plucked from the amateur Rugby League comp in Fiji as you state.

There are a lot of Myths about Uate learning to play League at Woy Woy.
He only played half a dozen games for them in a far from elite grade, and the game plan was just to give the ball to Uate and watch him beat all the defenders and score (I've been told that by a player from his team).
He learnt his running and evasive skills playing 7s on the beach in Fiji and learnt next to nothing at Woy Woy.
I saw most of his games in the under 18s for the Knights, and he didn't have a clue how to play League and only scored 1 try for the season, but he was impressive enough in a few games for his school to be named in the Australian schoolboys side, after maybe 10 or 15 games of League in his life.
Uate's skills came from God and playing Rugby 7s on the beach in Fiji. He barely knew where to stand when he arrived at the Knights as a 17 year old, but he could run a sub 11 seconds 100 metres and step around just about anyone.

The best 24 from each country were on show last year. The eyes of the RL world were on them, including scouts from all 30 professional RL teams on the planet. The were terrible........a couple were picked up by HKR and then dropped.
French RL players at Catalans (in the starting XIII) number single digits by the way.....not sure of the numbers of top flight PNG players in the NRL, but about 13 of the RLWC squad were NRL Based.....that's a poor return for a nation supposedly mad about the game.



Like a health warning on a packet of ciggies, the above should be attached to every single one of your posts.....

What is your point? Do you have any grasp of the meaning of what I wrote?

"As for France, the Catalans have produced a host of top class players that would find a place in any other Super League or NRL team (as Remi Casty, Julien Rinaldi, Olivier Elima and Jamal Fakir have already proven)."

So I didn't say that a large number of French Catalans players had already played in the NRL. I said that there had been a host of top class players who would (as in "capable of"icon_wink.gif find a place in the Super League OR the NRL. That means either (a) or (b). Get it?

Rinaldi and Elima already have played, and soon Fakir will have played, for Super League clubs other than Catalans. Theo Fages is a French player not from Catalans who has been a regular player for Salford.

Jerome Guisset (Canberra) and Remi Casty (Roosters) have already played in the NRL. Ben Garcia and Tony Gigot have been in the reserve teams of NRL clubs. You must have been on the bottle the day Casty played for the Roosters against Wigan Warriors in the World Club Challenge. This is the only explanation I can think of for your snide suggestion that Casty will soon play for Newtown. He may now have to play for Newtown for a few weeks because he has been out injured for so many weeks, during which time other props (Napa and Evans) have stepped up to the plate and performed well. But if you were an honest person you would have noted that Casty has already played in the NRL.

The fact that there are not more French players in the NRL has to do with a combination of most of them preferring to stay in France, and most NRL clubs being unaware of their existence.



Thanks for those factual corrections, which we see from another poster turn out to be not exactly candid about the complexity of Uate's rugby league origins. But what has it got to do with my main argument in my original post? Do you even remember the argument I was making in my original post? Or are you, like the nutter in New Zealand, so obsessed with personal points scoring that you don't really care?

Quote: JEAN CAPDOUZE "What is your point? Do you have any grasp of the meaning of what I wrote? "As for France, the Catalans have produced a host of top class players that would find a place in any other Super League or NRL team (as Remi Casty, Julien Rinaldi, Olivier Elima and Jamal Fakir have already proven)." So I didn't say that a large number of French Catalans players had already played in the NRL. I said that there had been a host of top class players who would (as in "capable of"icon_wink.gif find a place in the Super League OR the NRL. That means either (a) or (b). Get it? But if you were an honest person you would have noted that Casty has already played in the NRL.'" Great get out the OR bit. Why even mention NRL when none of them have played an official first grade game in it yet. Rinaldi played QLD Cup a few years ago, but that's as close as your list has got. Casty has not officially played an NRL first grade game YET, as you suggest he has, but keep talking. The WCC isn't one. As his record on the Roosters website proves Glad to help, I wouldn't want people on here to be misinformed that they were signed up from the NRL direct from Fiji, which if you read what roopy, who knows what he's on about actually backs up, by clearly stating that he did indeed play for Woy Woy (on the central coast as I said) therefore backing up my point, and that the Knights saw him and help make his natural ability into the player he is. ie They didn't sign him from Fiji at all. Read this, it proves he wasn't signed by an NRL club to play in OzAku was aged 16 when he left his home in the remote Fijian island of Lakeba to live with his father, David Uate, and stepmother Julie, at Woy Woy, on the Central Coast. ‘‘I wasn’t going really well at school because I always wanted to come home and go fishing and do things like that,’’ Aku says sheepishly. ‘‘So Dad brought me over here in 2003 to finish high school.’’ Aku attended Brisbane Water Secondary College, Woy Woy, where he became one of the foundation students in the school’s Rugby League Sports Academy. ‘‘It was just fun back then,’’ Aku recalls. ‘‘Mr [Matt] Marker and Mr [Mark] Cribb were teaching me rugby league basics like how to play the ball.’’ Rugby union had been the main football code played in Fiji, although Aku had always had an interest in rugby league and had closely followed the careers of Fijian rugby league stars Noa Nadruku and Lote Tuqiri on TV. Aku soon followed the lead of his cousins and schoolmates and joined the Woy Woy Roosters under-17s team in the Central Coast rugby league premiership.[/i www.theherald.com.au/story/46746 ... uila-uate/

Quote: JEAN CAPDOUZE "What is your point? Do you have any grasp of the meaning of what I wrote? "As for France, the Catalans have produced a host of top class players that would find a place in any other Super League or NRL team (as Remi Casty, Julien Rinaldi, Olivier Elima and Jamal Fakir have already proven)." So I didn't say that a large number of French Catalans players had already played in the NRL. I said that there had been a host of top class players who would (as in "capable of"icon_wink.gif find a place in the Super League OR the NRL. That means either (a) or (b). Get it? But if you were an honest person you would have noted that Casty has already played in the NRL.'" Great get out the OR bit. Why even mention NRL when none of them have played an official first grade game in it yet. Rinaldi played QLD Cup a few years ago, but that's as close as your list has got. Casty has not officially played an NRL first grade game YET, as you suggest he has, but keep talking. The WCC isn't one. As his record on the Roosters website proves Glad to help, I wouldn't want people on here to be misinformed that they were signed up from the NRL direct from Fiji, which if you read what roopy, who knows what he's on about actually backs up, by clearly stating that he did indeed play for Woy Woy (on the central coast as I said) therefore backing up my point, and that the Knights saw him and help make his natural ability into the player he is. ie They didn't sign him from Fiji at all. Read this, it proves he wasn't signed by an NRL club to play in OzAku was aged 16 when he left his home in the remote Fijian island of Lakeba to live with his father, David Uate, and stepmother Julie, at Woy Woy, on the Central Coast. ‘‘I wasn’t going really well at school because I always wanted to come home and go fishing and do things like that,’’ Aku says sheepishly. ‘‘So Dad brought me over here in 2003 to finish high school.’’ Aku attended Brisbane Water Secondary College, Woy Woy, where he became one of the foundation students in the school’s Rugby League Sports Academy. ‘‘It was just fun back then,’’ Aku recalls. ‘‘Mr [Matt] Marker and Mr [Mark] Cribb were teaching me rugby league basics like how to play the ball.’’ Rugby union had been the main football code played in Fiji, although Aku had always had an interest in rugby league and had closely followed the careers of Fijian rugby league stars Noa Nadruku and Lote Tuqiri on TV. Aku soon followed the lead of his cousins and schoolmates and joined the Woy Woy Roosters under-17s team in the Central Coast rugby league premiership.[/i www.theherald.com.au/story/46746 ... uila-uate/

On PNG players not being in the NRL.
Most of the PNG players like Costigan, Mead, Lam etc who made it in the NRL are guys from well off families who went to boarding schools in Queensland.
It's hard enough to get kids from country towns in Australia to settle into Sydney as teenagers, with most failing due to homesickness or just falling for all the temptations inherent with city living.
If it's hard to get kids from Taree or Dubbo to adapt, imagine how much harder it is for kids who have basically been living a stoneage existence in Goroka or Rabaul to adapt to living the life of a professional athlete in a first world city like Sydney or Brisbane?
Players from the Hunters will get to ease into the professional athlete lifestyle by living in PNG with their mates and family, while travelling to Brisbane every second week for the season.