None of which means squat, if the players aren't prepared to work hard to improve and refine their games continually.

How many promising juniors do we see hit regular first team rugby and then just never progress any further? There has to be reason for why so many plateau so easily, and a large part of it has to lie with how much the player wants to test themselves, refine their skills, learn new ones rather than just hit the comfort zone of the first team and settle back into a decent living.

You can throw all the quality coaching, facilities and nutrition you like at a player. If they're not prepared to listen because they're too happy going out with their mates rather than working on their game, then it won't make a blind bit of difference.

From the time they first come into contact with a professional club, a player's abilities should be continually improving not stalling or in some cases seemingly declining.

If you want a case in point, take a look at Ryan Atkins. How can a player build a career at one of the biggest clubs in the competition as a centre, and still not have the ability to draw a man and deliver a timed pass? Why hasn't that area of his game improved? I'm pretty sure the coaches he's had down the years will have tried to get him to work on it, but how much does Ryan himself need to? He's still getting picked. He's still getting paid. If he was an antipodean, he would have been bombed out of most NRL clubs by now for having such a massively important gap in his skill set.

I'm surprised no-one else had thought of it.

The gulf in class between NRL First and last is minimal.
The gulf in class between our top teams and the NRL is minimal
We could field 4 teams tomorrow and compete, give us the extra cap money, use it to pad out the squads and you're honestly telling me we can't compete?

Wakefield and Salford would get creamed though, week in week out.

Wigan/Wire/Saints/Leeds could easily make a fist of it.

The evidence of the WCC in recent years suggests we can compete, but only when the deck is stacked in our favour in terms of venue and timing.

If you sent Saints out to play that game again at the SFS in June, the result would IMO be similar if not worse. While the top SL clubs might pick up a few wins in a season, I can't see any of them coming close to winning an NRL GF. They're just not used to the week-in, week-out intensity that the NRL demands.

Maybe the solution is to put together a team of elite England players to play as a club side in the NRL? If only someone could blog about such a concept...

I'm not sure there's much of a solution. Bottom line here is that top athletes aren't sport-specific. The guys who are good at one sport tend to be good at all sports : right speed, strength, physique etc. In Oz, those top athletes gravitate towards many sports, but Rugby League is possibly the number one draw because of its profile and earnings power. Ditto RU in New Zealand. In this country, soccer sucks up nearly all our athletes. Nothing else comes close.

That's why the salary cap is a bit of a red herring - Union has far bigger pay packets than league in the UK, but the quality of player is no different - because they too are drawing on a much smaller pool of top athletes.

Essentially, there are better RL players currently knocking about the lower pro and semi-pro football leagues than there are in our top clubs' academies (Ryan Giggs a good example of this). Same goes for our Olympic squad, RU side and so on.

The question is: how do we get them to play RL instead of soccer? The only two ways are to either get them very young in a professional, well-run setup so that they love the game and dont really think about the round ball (very very hard given the media profile - which is why we only get top athletes from a tiny catchment in our most hardcore RL towns) or find a way of targeting those lads who just miss out on progression to pro soccer and convince them there's an alternative way of making a living from sport. But that involves getting a teenager to abandon his dreams of multi-millions, WAGS and superstardom.

I'm not sure there's a solution. Soccer is eating all men's sport in this country.

The type of physical shape we need is not suited to soccer, we need athletes with real strength and power, soccer needs guys with aerobic capacity and a lot of skill. If the NRL is the future model we need virtually every player to be 6'3" plus and capable of carrying 16' with the ability to run 20/30 metres very quickly.

The Souths team is not a typical NRL side, every now and then in sport you get something special and that's Souths at the moment.

Whatever the reason, be it Crowe, The fight to be re admitted, Souths history, the Burgess story, Something specials happened at Souths.

There's other sports looking at how Souths prepare their athletes in much the same way that they once (and still do) looked at the NFL. Those athletes are some of the best and most coveted in the NRL and some are coveted by a number of other competitions and sports like no other group of Rugby League players are or ever were.

Sts got blown away, however Souths would have beaten any team of Rugby players on the planet on that form whether they're from SL, the NRL or any side pulled together in Union including the All Blacks!

Of course we're behind the Ausies, while ever we are an after thought of a sport in the UK we will always be behind them, this chase to catch them is unrealistic.
They are for all intents and purposes the National sport of Australia, they get the pick of the best athletes available to them and also have the pulling power to make gifted athletes change their nationality. They have a profile which attracts the type of sponsorship, advertisers and hospitality customers that SL can only dream about.
They have a TV contract that compares with the Premier League (not quite) but it dwarfs that of the SL. That in turn allows them to invest in facilities which are at the cutting edge of athlete preparation, stuff we won't get over here for a decade or so later if ever.

Every now and then we will assemble a team capable of beating their NRL counterparts but not this Souths team, they're too good and are a freakish product of a perfect storm

I see over reactions are not going out of fashion.

The previous record defeat was 0-38. Which I believe was Saints also, when the cap was closer and the likes of Scully, Cunningham, Longy and Wellens were at their best.

This game is like fodder from heaven for some.

In the end it was a one off game. Saints played poorly, South's played well. Canterbury thrashed the Bulldogs 30-6 in the NRL GF. Does that mean the Bulldogs are a terrible team, that if they had played it would have been only a 15 point difference?

In the end a one off game is a one off game. Take the loss and move on.

Teams playing themselves is never a good way forward.

This, this and this again!!!
The OP is very negative and we must look at this weekend from 180° - what can we learn from the experience in order to make our comp stronger? I think it's an ace concept - hopefully the RFL/NRL will stick with it for five years at least before binning it or changing the format. Not sure why the first two games needed to go to golden point. So on that basis we drew one and lost two looking better already!!!

What good is it going to do if all we are achieving is providing Union and the NRL with a better standard of player?

Im sure both of those leagues will be licking their lips at us kindly making ourselves a farm system for them.

Ok but if we raise the SC then none of the money will go towards what really needs to be done and will just allow us to keep one or two players in SL who would have gone to RU or the NRL. If the clubs have the right systems in place then the conveyor belt of talent should increase as more players are benefiting from the improved setup. This in turn would make losing 1 or 2 players to other sports less of an issue.

Raising the SC will only provide a temporary fix. The top 4 or 5 clubs would be way out of reach of the rest of the teams in SL and the CC which means rather than the best players moving to RU or NRL, they'll just move to one of 4 or 5 top SL clubs.

The compromise to this would be the marquee player allowance. That would keep the integrity of the salary cap while allowing us to hold onto some of our best talents.

Except we supposedly did in this World Club Series. So we had benefit of home advantage, match fitness and refereeing interpretations, and our best still got tonked out of the park by the NRL's best. Our other two sides were competitive with two teams from the mid-table of the NRL who will struggle to make their playoffs this year.