Hope Melbourne win. North Queensland finished half way down the friggin table.

Stopping at China city for post game buffet after playing Leeds are they.

Very dull one sides final, if this is the Nrl, keep it.

Nice wally lewisesq pass by that second rower there, highlight of game, Melbourne and Craig Bellamy just bludgeon and bore sides to death.

That the beauty of real play-off football and a competition with depth. A team can finish 8th and be competitive.

The storm are a super team. A fantastic full back, a great 7 with Cronk, a great 9 in Smith.

Those three players alone make such a difference.

Bloody hell Leeds won from 5th and it was a joke apparently that a team could win from that position in SL, but in the NRL a team reaches the final from 8th and it's great.

The point isn't the cowboys got to the final. The point is they have a competition where they can have a play off system which can have 8 sides competing. We scrapped play offs due to the lack of real competitors down the league.

Why do you think this is?

Salary cap where the vast majority of sides spends the full cap. Players moving all through the league which creates a more balanced competition. Top players don't just stay at the same side or move to other top teams due to the wages on offer all throughout the league.

The only side of who is at a real disadvantage is the Warriors simply because players don't want to leave Sydney or Queensland for Auckland.

We scraped 8 team playoffs because people moaned that it was unfair that teams could finish that far down and still have a chance at winning the title.

No we scrapped it because once you got to 6th, 7th and 8th there were generally blowout scores. The crowds were down as I guess people didn't believe they were watching KO football as the top sides would beat the lower sides comfortably.

Similar story with Canberra...

Really?

5th would play 8th and 6th vs 7th so two would be gone before they faced a top side. Leeds won from 5th twice, Catalans got very close from 8th in 2009. Wire & Catalans reached the SF's from 5th & 7th in 2014.

You only have to see the reaction when Cas won the LLS and people were going on about how it's wrong that they might not be champions if they don't win the GF, one thing if 2nd place a Leeds beat then, if a team came from 7th or 8th to beat them in a GF people would be going crazy.

Correct but the first round of games saw a drop in crowds as those teams could lose and then play the lower ranked side in second chance which they generally won comfortably.

Just look at the teams who have reached the grand final under the last system and now and you see the same sides over and over again.

Whether Castleford finished 1st or if it was 8th in the last system it's a breath of fresh air seeing someone new reach the Grand Final. The more sides we have that have a genuine chance of making it to the final by hook or crook the better.

Looking at a lot of SL play offs in recent years the biggest problem has been the complete lack of gumption/desire shown by too many teams once they've got there. For all the problems with the system, this year in the Super 8s most teams have at least had a bit of a dig.