I'm with Richie. Some of the defence in the 'good old days' was laughable. If you watch games from the 70s, the tackling and running with the ball are laughably soft in comparison to today. That's why old-fashioned ball handlers could play the way they did - the defence would stand off them (sadly a bit like england tend to do with Aussie halfbacks). If you look at NRL Grand Finals from the late 80s/early 90s the defensive lines are worse than they are in SL today, and the intensity isn't there.

To reverse, mugwump's argument, if you put Cunningham into RL in the 80s or earlier he would have been seen as the most destructive prop ever. He would never have needed to be a hooker. Bring a hooker from the contested scrum era into today's game and where, exactly, would they play? The answer is amateur RL at best. The one skill they had - hooking - has gone, never to return.

Bottom line is people tend to remember the good old days fondly - and I have no problem with that, I do it myself. But it does tend to add a rose tint when comparing to the modern game. Any player even from less than 20 years ago would have to be trained to modern levels to avoid looking anything like a complete numpty.

Good post.
I can't help thinking some fans of the game today wont be happy until the players are wearing large shoulder pads ,crash helmets,the ball is much smaller, and the players can throw it 60yd forward with one hand,oh and the posts only have one stantion in the middle holding them up

...now hat's just silly. Such a sport would never catch on

Thing is Iv'e no wish to watch that sport.
If SLE ltd wants to go that way then fine by me.
The mother code is moving 'very' slowly towards what rl use to be like a number of yrs ago and 'i'll be honest if i had a say in how the championships were run i'd be reversing a number of the on field rule changes that have occured over the last 15yrs or so in an attempt to meet them at some point in the future rather than go down the route SLe ltd is going down

Mugs... I gave you a serious answer to your serious question as to whether the game was financially/commercially in rude health when we got a one-off 100,000+ attendance for a show-piece event. It can't have been [ithat[/i serious a question if you had no more comments to my thoughts on the matter, or were some of my questions too hard?

Sure, and rugby league can be broken down solely to indivisible units such as "running", "passing" and "tackling". Are you the kind of coach who offers pearls of wisdom from the sidelines such as [i"get it out wide!"?[/i

Are you so dense as to think people fifty years ago didn't think [iseriously[/i about the game? There weren't outstanding coaches with brilliant tactical minds? There weren't players who didn't spend all their time thinking about how they could gain a competitive advantage over the other guy?

And "obsolete" skills aren't so by any objective measure. This isn't science.

Don't flatter yourself, mate. The serious answer is - I'd completely forgotten. These days my time in here is strictly limited.

But I will have a bash now.



I've no idea whether the game was "commercially successful" back then. I'm not sure fans even thought in those terms or viewed the game within the same kind of social context.

"Commercial success" seems like more of an argument than anything else. If we were more successful commercially would we be any better off? On the face of it I'd say yes - but then I must also concede that money itself [icreates problems[/i. I mean, the game was awash with money when Murdoch initially pumped millions into it. Yes, we ended up turning fully pro which - if nothing else - prevented one or two teams dominating the sport by being such whilst the rest stayed semi. But I think all league fans will concede that that money was not best used. Much of it leaked away from the sport - through big contracts, big wages for CEOs etc.

It would be great to see more money flowing into the sport (unlikely, given the current economic climate which my guess is will become much worse before anything else) - but money dependency comes with its own dangers. Lose a major sponsor and you're teetering on the edge of oblivion etc. Make a bad investment (a whopping four-year player contract to someone who plays twenty games in four seasons) and you run the risk of underfunding your squad for half a decade.

Of course, teams have always been dependent on cash. Money is at least part of the reason we split from RU in the first place. But I think today the money game has assumed as great a significance as what takes place on the pitch. And I'm not sure that's necessarily a good thing.

Rugby league very much can be broken down to skills in "running" "Passing" and tackling"

I'm a fairly technical coach (particularly on carry technique, passing, offload skills, and the play the ball) and also fairly strong on lifestyle and how a player should approach training and games. Not that it's relevant to this discussion.




Bit dissapointing but not suprising you're reverting to personal insults now. Not sure why you would think I think "people fifty years ago didn't think [iseriously[/i about the game? There weren't outstanding coaches with brilliant tactical minds? There weren't players who didn't spend all their time thinking about how they could gain a competitive advantage over the other guy?" Why you would think I think that, I have no idea at all.



There is a significant element of science to all sport.

I'm yet to see you point to any current skill that the old days saw repeatedly better executed BTW.

Back in the 70s when I started watching the game the players were far less well drilled than they are nowadays. Their decision making, as judged by the probability of succeeding with what they were attempting to do, was atrocious compared to modern players. Their levels of fitness were far lower. But the lack of orthodoxy back then led to far greater unpredictability and very occasional brilliance. Much more so than today's game, at least in my book.

- no self flattery involved, I figured you'd forgot but figured you'd respond to a slap rather than a polite "ahem".



You were the one who pointed to the 100k Odsal crowd to try and point to perhaps a better supported and more well received sport as far as the clubs' catchment areas were concerned.

And you (and others) were right to, of course - IMO anyway. One thing that must be noted is that since the 50s a lot of clubs had to drastically reduce their ground capacities because of quite correct safety requirements and considerations (check the offical maximum attendance figures for any of the old RL stadiums that have been replaced in the past 15 years, by the time they were pulled down, they simply could not have accomodated the volume of people they once did), ally this to an otherwise complete lack of investment of expanding or improving/modernising their facilities and it must be considered as having a big potential on turning people away from the sport and/or failing to attract new people to it.

Wilderspool, as much as I loved the place, was an abhorrent hole, and the same can be said for Knowsley Road, Central Park etc as far as I'm concerned. Rose tinted specs will always cloud the memories of the grand old ladies, but they did/do nothing to attract new attendees.



I don't disagree with you in any of that - right now it's plainly evident that RL is dependent not so much on getting people in through the turnstiles as they are on richer incomes from advertising and sponsorship deals, and the overall competition sponsorship / TV deal money.

I also think though that for clubs to exist, they have to have some commercial model (be it wealthy benefactor, Aussie style 'league club' membership, etc) to operate under, and it must be viable, or dare I say even profitable if the club has aspirations to improve (either in squad strength/depth, or facilities).

The thing where I disagree with others on this forum is that the lack of attractiveness RL seems to suffer from is not, necessarily, because the national press outlets are colluding to smother coverage of the game, I would say that if the game appeared to the casual observer to be better supported by a bigger volume of people, then they would have less of an excuse for a lack of column inches. I genuinely think if RL wants to improve it's income, and thus provide a more secure footing for further development, academies, and god-forbid supporting the local amateur teams, which I believe all pro/semi-pro clubs should be attempting to do (not necessarily with cash, but offerirng coaching/resources where practicable, etc), then the first thing they should be doing is attempting to increase the number of people turning up to support.

Obviously, there's no magic bullet to achieve that - but the facilities available are one big part of it, the other big part is the advertising (or lack of) undertaken in the local area. I can only speak from my personal experience in this matter but at one time, Warrington used to put game advertisement posters on the walls of Wilderspool and that was pretty much it as far as I ever saw, this has improved in recent years but I'd still like to see more, I can't imagine it would be prohibitively expensive to print out more A4 posters advertising games and stick them up in shopping centres and pubs, or other areas that a large number of people frequent, but maybe I'm wrong on how much that kind of simple marketing would cost to operate and would be happy to be corrected.

So, it goes a bit deeper than that. Thank you.



I think it because your reasoning is pretty contradictory. You claim Rugby League is far more skilled today. I point out that it is undoubtedly stronger in facets of the game we have chosen to concentrate on - size, strength, fitness etc. but since greater emphasis was placed on specialisation in the fifties and sixties it's a silly comparison. You then claim this isn't so because those skills are obsolete. Which is absurd because players from the sixties (brought forward in some kind of weird time machine) could reasonably argue today's RL is deficient in facets of the game that were important back then. Not that we need some supernatural device to settle this debate as we regularly hear older players today congratulating modern players on their skills, strength etc. whilst ALSO making the point that League was a different sport and comparisons are difficult to make.

But for reasons that escape me you are not convinced. You intuitively KNOW that players today are far more skilled in all facets of the game. And if at any point your argument seems under threat you conveniently whip out the "obsolescence" argument - which at best accepts as a premise that which is very definitely still to be proved.



Kicking out of the hand? Drop goals? By all means try to argue the distance kicking I've seen at Knowsley Road in the last four or five years of Sean Long is better than anything that's gone before it.

In any case this is incidental as you have still not successfully argued why I shouldn't include skills that we no longer concentrate on. Talk about stacking the deck in your own favour.

Yes. Not sure why you didn't get it first time around.


But you are make an erroneous assumption that other "skill" elements of the sport have been neglected, but still not given any reasoning for that belief.


Was it? Didn't players work hard on size, strength fitness etc back then? Could it just be that as we have got better at training strength stamina and speed, we have also got better at training skill?


Yet you claim that today's players are entirely lacking in specialist skills.
Despite all the skills Keiron Cunningham had, the only element you refer to of his game is his physical ability.


No intuition at all. Simply observation.



That's it? One single player at one single team? And you want to compare him to all of history? That's your case?
How does the kicking out of hand at Warrington games compare to yesteryear?



Your previous reference to hooking in the scrum was not a skill that we no longer concentrate on, it was a skill that is entirely obselete and irrelevant.
It's like lambasting modern taxi drivers for a lack of skill because they can't handle a team of horses pulling a carriage.

I've taken another look back over your posts in this thread. You do seem convinced that the modern player is only about athletic ability rather than skill. It's as if you have been so blinded by the incredible athleticism that you can't see the skill. Look beyond the athleticsm and you will see the skill is there in far greater scope and level than ever before.