or

which is it?

Watched the first 5 minutes of France v Romania as sat on couch with a cold. How they can fill a stadium for that tripe is beyond me. Talk about emperors new clothes. Goes to show hype and marketing over product will work every time, jut need to keep working on better promotion of the game, sadly something we have never been good at. As said the NZ test series should be in full,swing for marketing now.

If you'd have hung on, there was about five minutes of rugby played at the end of the first half...

50,276....……there's your line in this sand and that's without england playing.....if.only we could get peoples to watch us....

Yeah, because every minute of every game of every year in the history of RL has always been exciting

That explains why (according to a bloke on general RL forum) crowds and TV ratings are down this year and why RLs own fans are getting bored with it.

(Now you come back and say the well-rehed line of even a boring RL game is miles better than any RU game)

Tbh if you can show me a start of a RL game that was as dull as the first 5 mins of that game I'll totally agree with you, it went:
Ko
Ball received ran up maul, kick into touch
Line out ruck, kick down field
Mail, pass, maul knock on
Scrum pass, pass maul, turn over
Pass kick straight to opposition 30 metres away
Run back pass, terrible attempt at chip over
Knock on, scrum.

At that point I had enough and flicked over to golf which was marginally more exciting.

Like I said if you can sell well it doesn't matter how poor the product is.

But the product in international rugby union isn't - to a large degree - what happens on the pitch. It's being able to say "I was there" when you're at the golf club bar with your chums the following day, to paraphrase Max Boyce.

Same way that probably 20% of the people who turn up at Test cricket have little or no interest in the game but are there for a day out.

No disrespect intended to Hull, but a trip to the KC to watch an RL Test doesn't have the element of an "experience" that you can sell to the less than committed sport watcher. Until RL finds a way to make its international games an experience which ranks alongside the Grand Final or Challenge Cup Final, rather than an afterthought tacked onto the end of the season, it will struggle to sell tickets for them in anything approaching the volume that Union does.

i do agree with the theory there, but, if RU did that at one of our competitions then there would be hell on!

in ideal world both codes could and should support and help each other, sadly it isn't an ideal world

Havent watched a union game for years, people kept saying it had become closer to RL and was more open. Being on my sick bed I was flicking and thought I'd take a look, will come back in another few years to see if it's got any better.

It's absolutely tragic, but unfortunately it's true.

And the corollary of that is, we won't make great inroads into union's popularity by tweaking and 'improving' our own product (even if we were able to do so).

Everyone in my office is talking about the RUWC right now. None of them show any interest in the sport at any other time of year. In fact, not being funny, I reckon I know a damn more about RU than most of them do.

That's like someone watching the first ten minutes of Widnes v Hull KR and deciding that all of rugby league is terrible, played on plastic pitches in front of half-empty, soulless stadiums.

The Super 15 and Rugby Championship in the southern hemisphere have moved substantially closer to RL, with a focus on avoiding taking the ball into contact and a move away from setpiece-based game plans. Sadly, as in RL, the northern hemisphere is lagging behind in that transformation and persists on playing forward based styles primarily based on the fact it's still a winter sport and is often played in conditions that don't encourage an expansive game.

The Japanese are probably the closest thing this World Cup has to an RL side, simply because their setpieces don't match up to the big teams so they have to be more expansive with the ball and keep it in play for as long as possible.

So people told you that RU had stopped doing mauls, line-outs, scrums, etc? If not, why were you surprised that RU still did them?

Japan Rugby are more like a 7s side than a RL side, Japans 15s and 7s sides interchange and work together a lot.

You probably do but so what? That's how you attract new fans into the game (sorry, 'product').