I'm the same for the 1st time in 15 years I won't be getting a season ticket next year and will just pick and choose my games, I find most leagues boring where the teams are doing the minimal needed, i'm sick of seeing good fair tackles getting pulled back for penalties because of the banning of shoulder charge...

Look at clips like Talis and O'Conner going toe to toe and then getting binned to cool down, that now would probably end up as 2 reds and both getting 3 games, bring back the biff.

Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks.

34 years of Wire for me, and not had a season ticket for about 6 years (varying reasons, jobs, marriage, child, double redundancy for me and Mrs G in the space of a month)
Barely been to an away game since World War 3 at the JJB in 2001ish
If it's on Sky/BBC I'll watch at home with my family, and a bottle of shiraz,
and personally, I've not fallen out of love with the game......your priorities change as you age (I'm pretty sure all these fans who call themselves 100%, forever, true, loyal etc are all under 25.....don't worry, they'll change), I've changed my way of support for my team.
I'll stick up for them just the same as I did, when I had a ST for 18 consecutive years. When I used to get p155wet through away at Cas, Swinton and frozen to death at Watersheddings and Odsal.

As for sanitisation, I do tend to agree.

No biff. Eddie, Stevo, and Carney weeing their pants whenever a fist is raised. "There are kids watching, they don't want to see this" YES THEY DO. Just check out that WWF tosh, the kids love it.

The banning of the shoulder charge....PATHETIC. Anybody who's watched our game knows the difference between a properly executed one, and an outandout cheapshot. For God's sake, Les Davidson would only play about 6 games a season, and he COULD shoulder charge (legitimately).

Constant use of the big screen drives me up the wall, particularly for obstruction when there is none. MAKE A DECISION, REFS.

The holding down in the tackle has been a problem since Moses was in short pants. It's never going to go away until the RFL deal with it PROPERLY, AND USE IT AT ALL TIMES.

The RFL, is well....the RFL. It's not brilliant, but it's all we've got. I'm sure Messrs Branson and Sugar have some marketeers going spare, that they could hand over.

They one thing that slightly worries me, is, all our players (RL in general) seem to be carbon copies of each other. They're all 6'1", 14.75 stone, lean mean fighting machines, without a scrap of body fat on them.
With a few exceptions, they seem to have any flair trained out of them.
Witness Westerman a few years ago. Great player in broken play, but now, he just tackles and drives the ball up. Where are the Harry Pinners of old. Yes, he was an overweight, slowar53, but he knew how and when to pass.
Look at Harrison for us. Good player, of course, but a loose forward? Not while he's got a hole in his bottom.

That's my main bugbare. The entertainment is being driven out of the sport, for the needs of a stats man. Phil Larder has a lot to answer for

I agree with your point about football and had assumed it was the size of the crowd rather than the quality of the game which made it exciting - on the basis that tiddlewinks would also be exciting if it were played in front of 30-40 thousand supporters. However after yesterdays bore-athon at Wembley in front of 78 thousand, I'm no longer convinced.

Re the comment about football , it is a sport where the media over the years have helped to lift it onto its lofty perch, but that really is a sterile sport. If only the RL could have a love in with the media.

Exactly

Remember that shoulder charge Davo did on Sam Backo (at that time the current kangaroo prop and rated #1 in the world) at Headingley? Les dipped his shoulder perfectly and Backo damn near did a 360 degree loop-the-loop and ended flat on his back. As you say, he'd probably get 3 matches for that now.

As for Premiership football it's a million miles away in entertainment from Spanish, German or Italian footie let alone RL but it's the emperors new clothes syndrome. If the press keep telling you it's the best league in the world day in day out, people will believe it. Having yawned my way through the CC yesterday I watched MOTD and most of that was equally poor but I'm sure no-one @ the FA is wringing their hands in despair.

brilliant post and i totally agree...i remember the wigan game down here at wilderspool with boyd humphries and shelford of wigan going at it toe to toe..no one left that game moaning...years ago the game had characters and yes theres just a few today but the game has things like the biff missing...does any one really listen to phil clarkes stats with interest cos i dont...

The media responds to trends, it doesn't set them.

The media got a big love in with football from the early 1990s onwards. Before then, the media liked to present a pretty bad image of football. I'm not old enough to remember the 60s and 70s but in the 1980s the image the media liked to portray of football was it was a sport of hooligans and thugs, and represented a 'social problem' that the great Iron Lady had to fight against. They hated the fact Liverpool were successful, it grated with the media that the jobless and feckless scousers, had something to be famous about on an international stage other than the Beatles. So as soon as Hillsborough happened the media jumped all over them as thugs and hooligans and only backtracked when they were forced to by the facts.

In the early 1990s things changed, Italia '90 seemed to reach a bigger audience in England than previous World Cups had, the Taylor report meant stadiums had to become all seater which then meant the pricing structure changed and football became more a sport of people with middle and higher incomes rather than low incomes. Also around this time the introduction of pay TV where channels exclusively devoted to sport could screen loads of games meant a market developed which hadn't been there before and TV companies switched on to this. That meant the Premier League would be on a different scale in terms of finance than the old First Division had ever been, which also meant the Premier League clubs had more purchasing power in getting big names from Europe to come.

So the overall product looked a lot better and more media friendly and the media got on the bandwagon, if they had just been running constant stories about Millwall and Leeds thugs nobody would have been interested.

In rugby league we had similar changes to be fair but not on the same scale. Crowds are bigger than they were in the 1980s, league gets a bit more coverage in the national media than it used to and I think the awareness of RL among general sports fans is better than it was back then. Ironically the RU interest in RL has also helped us a bit, with signing a lot of RL players, whilst a few union journalists snipe at league in the papers I don't think the general view of RL in RU circles is bad, its seen as a breeding ground for good players.

Phil Clarke stats.... I listen, but I don't have a Scooby Doo what they mean! Does anyone? Does anybody care?

Replace phil Clarke with Rubber Duckie and it still works.

Yet another "RL is getting worse so I won't be renewing my season ticket" thread. Don't we get these every single season?