I agree with Call Me God. We have moments of drama/interest/excitement in the year but most people only see this sporadically, maybe even only once a year. The Cup Final, Grand Final and recent Test match are great games for people to watch but then there’s nothing in between. We may well build some interest in November with the Test Matches being on BBC but then there’s nothing at all until February and nothing of note on FTA until July/August.

On a related point we build interest in a local area like Liverpool with the Test Match or Newcastle with the Magic Weekend but then never follow up on it.

A game on FTA every week would be huge for the game in my opinion.

A good post and plenty to agree with.

However, with some of the stuff going on regarding brain damage caused by contact with the head, it is more likely that we will see further attempts to reduce contact in this area, together with additional/stronger penalties.
I do agree that accidental contact should not be penalised but, could still allow head tests etc

Also, I massively agree with your comments regarding coverage of the game and how negative it has become.
We should be banging the drum about the athleticism of the players and the skills involved in executing certain plays both in attack and defence and offering some explanation as to how sides have read the play or opened up the opposition - I think that John Wells is pretty good as this.

I tend to agree - the coverage is stale and old, and tends to over-focus on negatives, errors or referee calls that are questionable, at least in the eyes of the commentators. It would be much more of a sell for the game if there was more notice paid to the strength, power, toughness, skill and athleticism on show - of which, regardless of your view of the quality of the game right now, there is plenty, every week, in every game. To a fan it's just annoying, eye-rolling stuff; to a new viewer, it's probably off-putting.

I also note that RL players are mostly absent from other media - there was a brief period when Tomkins and Sinfield were on QoS and such, and Keegan Hirst was a minor celeb for a while due to his personal story - but we don't have any 'personality' players who have transcended the sport and become celebrities in their own right; which seems odd, because the physicality and extreme challenge of RL would, you would imagine, be an interesting hook to find out more about the guys who play. That's perhaps an area in which the Hearn's would be an interesting proposition; they've made international celebrities out of some fairly ordinary guys who happen to be talented boxers. There would be a tonne of ways to market a RL player's personal brand, not least in the area of health, diet and wellbeing - with the added spice of ordinary, working class backgrounds, which is always a handy backstory.

It's not my area of expertise, but I would bet that a decent, centrally funded agency could do wonders with 3 or 4 RL players as clients.

Reckon there'd be many takers on the playing front? Every single player that shows an ounce of individuality or personality immediately becomes fair game for the sport's many boo-boys. Not surprisingly, given that much of the playing pool comprises young men with relatively low social confidence, I suspect many just prefer to keep their heads down and dodge that bullet.

I reckon there'd be plenty if they were earning out of it - RL hardly makes you rich.

As for the individuality and personality - I guess most incidents of that are negative; Joel Tomkins abusing a young barmaid went viral, Hardaker's latest in a long line of misdemeanours made the nationals, and the Trinity players who crashed the gaffers car into a wall got a lot of media. Maybe if some of our players were coached and managed, they could get similar attention, but for positive reasons?

As someone else said , a lot of the blame for the way the game looks nowadays can be placed at the feet of coaches. They'll always try to bend the rules to make them work for them, but active coaches have had far too much input into the way rules are interpreted or made. If you left it to them we'd end up with grid iron, because that would make everything controllable and coachable.

Whilst we can all have ideas, if we want to improve the spectacle I'd get a bunch of ex players and coaches (i.e. nobody currently involved with a team would be eligible) to work on ideas. Then use junior games to test them out.

As this is a forum, some ideas include:

- shot clock on scrums and dropouts, but only 15 seconds, not 30.
- three strikes then sin bin for all holding down/attempts to slow the attack
- all players in the scrum not able to move 5 metres from the scrum until after the second play has started. That would keep them out of the first play completely and possibly the second.
- allow quick taps for all penalties/restarts
- reduce interchanges to 6 at most
- bring back some ability to contest possession - e.g. striking at the PTB, stripping when more than one player is in the tackle

In terms of wrestling the biggest problem is the third and even 4th men into tackles. Players are taught how to hold up the runner and we end up with a bunch of players just struggling for no reason other than to delay the PTB. To make it worse we then have the tackled player 'magically' fall to the floor the second the ref calls held. You also have players like Cameron Smith who are expert at somehow getting themselves tangled up with the ball runner, further delaying attempts to PTB. We need to go back earlier calls of held and to a penalty if the tacklers don't get off immediately. Anyone who doesn't think this is possible should watch coverage of games before about 2010 - tacklers jumping off runners like scalded cats in comparison to today.

Being really radical, I'd also seriously consider not allowing more than two tacklers anywhere outside a teams 20 - a third or fourth could only join in if a player breaks a tackle or one of the others falls off. Players have shown with the current stripping rule that they can play to that sort of rule without a problem.

I have no idea what you posted so can't comment further and indeed won't if Karen saw fit to act, but, in fairness there was a lot of calls from posters on here for Mods to be active and tidy the place up as it was seen as a place full of trolls, multiple account holders, contributors derailing threads to suit their agendas, such as expansionism, RU, Leigh and Wakefield (bizarrely no disrespect to either club) or whatever the flavour of the month is.

It seems that you are damned if you do and damned if you don't.

I do find the term Nazi offensive btw and as a Forum there has to be rules and some civility surely? I'm not particularly the banning 'type' ,but, recent actions have been met with some support, oh but only as long as it's this poster or that a poster.....

You can't have it both ways and criticizing the Moderation process is against the Forum rules.

I deleted the comment because it was unnecessary, rude, and offered absolutely nothing to the thread. Believe it or not, simply replying "What a load of crap" to a post isn't very mature. Don't agree with him, I have no problem with that, but at least put a counter argument against his comments rather that just being rude.

Have you read his post it was ridiculous it was like reading something from someone who’d never seen the game before so yeah it was a load of crap sorry to use such language in these sensitive times

It wasn't the language. It was your inability to put forward a counter argument as to why you believed it was a load of crap. Forums are about differing beliefs so feel free to put your argument forwards, just in a slightly more intelligent way than "What a load of crap"

My pet peeve is the 'fumble' interpretation of a ball that is lost backwards but ruled as a knock forward. It absolutely p****s me off to see the game stopped and a scrum given because a player has knocked the ball backwards, yet it happens time and again. I know some people think treating it as a 'fumble' penalises poor handling but that's not what is supposed to happen. As long as it's gone backwards I'd rather let both sets of players scramble for the loose ball than have an a technically unecessary scrum, the side making the error is penalised because they have to work harder to recover and the opposition gets a chance to either win possession or at least put some additional pressure on. I was watching the Wales v Scotland RU game on Saturday and I saw a ball get dropped backwards by Wales and the referee (correctly) ruled play on and the Welsh players scrambled to recover, and I said to my Dad in a SL game that would almost certainly have been rulled as a knock on despite it clearly going backwards.

One noticeable difference from an Aussie ref yesterday was that he allowed play to carry on when an England player was down injured in backplay. While there is a fine line between putting a team at a disadvantage when a player is genuinely injured, we would see a reduction in play acting and fake injuries if this was done more often.

We do that anyway. The only time we don’t is when play has already stopped, the injured player is in the way of the play, or it’s a head injury.

I don’t think there’s an issue with faked injuries during play, it’s when play has stopped that we have a problem.
Unfortunately now I think that we have to go down the football route, if a player needs the trainer/physio etc and play to be delayed then they should go off the pitch and not come back on for the next set of 6.

I don’t want to go down that route and there will be some legitimate injuries caught up in that unfairly but I don’t know of another way to discourage the faking of injuries that we currently see.

I think most agree the game needs speeding up. Though I’m not necessarily in the camp of ‘let’s do what the Aussies do’ I think they’ve made a few good changes recently.

1: Standardise the rules of the game throughout NRL, SL and internationals. Any future tweaks are agreed and implemented across all levels.

2: 2 referees, if this means loosing the VR and putting him on the field, so be it. See point 1.

3: Actually implement the rules, not an interpretation of. Ie when the ref calls held the players get of, not wait for the ref to be held then put the player to the floor then get off. If not it’s a penalty. With regard to this the refs need to call held sooner, as soon as forward momentum/being pushed back is stopped this will probably reduce offload but speed the PTB up. Attached must play the ball with the foot.

4: Shot clock, great innovation imo, see point 1.

5: Increase substitutes to 6, 2 of which must be club trained and under 21 at the start of the season and club trained. At the same time decrease substitutions to 8 per game.

6: Milking, let’s face it, every team and virtually every player are guilty of it to some extent. There was a great example in the test match. I think it was Hill who obviously made sure that he moved and played the ball directly into a player lying on the floor, tried to milk the penalty, ref ignored it resulting in Hill disadvantaging his own team. If the refs don’t give a penalty if they believe milking is involved the players will stop doing it.

As far as the rules go that’s a good start imo

If you are not a player, ref or actively attempting surgery on a fallen player you must not be on the pitch. Water should be available on the touch line. Stop coaches standing on the field of play directing players, in fact award extra points if the attacking team can trample underfoot anyone in a fluorescent bib on the pitch.