I fear for the future of "our" game when die hards are getting bored.

The Wales v South Africa game bored me into doing the washing up.

It was shockingly bad. Wales battering at the SA line was just as boring as our 5 drives and an aimless kick. The number of mistakes from SA and the standard of their kicking from hand was terrible. I suppose it's a crumb of comfort to know such poor quality games also occur in a major RU game featuring their best players. I did however think the England game was great entertainment and something we (KFP) need to bring to the HJ next year.

Aye a dreadful, drab game this morning.

I think in sport there's an unresolvable tension between winning and entertainment.

Coaches are hired to win and judged on their record. They face high pressure to gain results now, else they are fired. This affects their incentives. Coaching innovations tend to focus on how to negate the opposition plan and how to minimise mistakes.

It happens across all sports. I listened to a great podcast a few months back about this in Brazilian football, where everybody now mythologises Tele Santana and the 1982 World Cup squad as the peak of 'the beautiful game' but they didn't even make the semi finals and through the 1980s Brazilian fans became increasingly angry that a team that they had got used to seeing winning world cups was now in the shadow of Germany, Italy etc. They then started to focus on a more mistake-free, conservative style which got them back to winning in 94 and 02. When they won, people then started comparing them negatively to Santana's team but in reality they were scathing of Santana at the time for not winning.

Today's game definitely put the 'yawn' back into Union good old kick and crap

Just a thought will the jocks the paddy's and the sheep sorry the Taffy's be siding with england on Saturday...

More chance of us winning the Grand Final

Not where I work even the Kiwi amongst us wants England to lose because we knocked them out.

The funny thing is, I suspect this hatred stems from their 'belief' that the English are all Jacob Rees Mogg types and/ or the way the English upper classes have treated any Johnny foreigner types in the past.

And the arrogance of the English to demand that the Welsh/Scots should be supporting England.

When it's the World Club Challenge and Wigan or Saints play an Aussie team, do all Warrington fans show patriotism and support their countrymen or do some of them support the Aussies because they'd rather see their rivals get beat...

To counter ...

1. Liverpool and City managed to win and entertain last season.
2. Price could hardly be considered to be under high pressure.

Yes it is possible to do it, but only a few sports teams do it because they need a) elite coaches and b) enough elite players with the ability to play entertaining styles and execute complex/risky plays at speed, to be able to do it. When you have that, you have the best of both worlds because play that stretches the field is hard for opponents to negate, hence City and Liverpool win almost every week against inferior opposition.

In rugby league, with the salary cap and general scarcity of talent both in coaching and talent on the field, it's much harder to get a SL team doing it. Warrington haven't ever been a super high entertainment team like Saints under Millward, but we had a go at playing fairly open rugby in the Cullen era and then the same in the early Smith era (peak entertainment in the time we had Solomona).

There aren't the players with the ability to execute that style of rugby now, which is why no team really plays like that.

In the context of this scarcity we probably should credit Daryl Powell and Cas who in their best form in 2017 were pretty exciting to watch, with a side that lacked big guns.

I cannot believe that there is an fundamental lack of players able to play flowing RL. I think it is the way the players are recruited and coached.

When you think back to some of the players of the 80s and 90s who had bags of flair and ability - to think they were working day jobs too.

Let's just see what we do with the raw talent of Matty Ashton....

If RL continues in this vein producing automaton robots, at the expense of RL ability, it's going to lose what dwindling fan base it already has.

Those players were working day jobs but were also playing against defences that were working day jobs as well. The levels of fitness and defensive organisation were not as good then so it was going to be easier to find space.

People also say that the NRL is getting boring these days and they have some incredibly talented players so there is some element of defences crowding out the space available.

Similar will happen with Matty Ashton. SL defences are not going to allow him the space he got in the Championship, but this might get interpreted by supporters as our coaches 'coaching the talent out of him'.

On Ashton, one thing to look for next season is how many fans include him in their starting 'strongest line ups' during the off season ahead of Ratchford, and then also how many fans criticise Price for 'not giving him a chance' later on...because he preferred Ratchford...