Quote: p.thomson69 "Ok so it's not your cup of tea, and as a spectator sport I'm watching wigan not club RU, (except my own club)
But the RFU/WRU/IRU put a great deal of effort into the national side and it's players, who knew Sam Tomkins or Sam Burgess outside RL, lots of people know who Owen Farrell, Johnny wilkinson & Martin Johnston are.
Asked you average Welshman who the welsh RU team are they would reel off a list of current players.
Show a Welshman a shot of Gareth Edwards and they will name him, he hasn't played for 35 years. He's a national hero.
Thats the potential RL has, it's not tapped into.'"
I will never dispute that the RFL have killed professional RL in Britain. Or that the Aussies have shown astonishing isolationist short-sightedness, which has also contributed to the inevitable destruction of the professional game in this country.
But I'm afraid I don't agree with several of your assertions about RU - and I have been around that game a lot too. I played it for many years before I turned to RL.
The apparent guarantee that RL players crossing over will get fast-tracked into the England camp - it's built into their contracts, according to Mike Stephenson - strongly suggests the basic skills required to play high level rugby are absent across a lot of British RU. I can see no other reason why the likes of Sam Burgess, Sam Tomkins, Joel Tomkins, Kyle Eastmond, Christ Ashton, Iain Thornley etc - guys who'd never played RU before - should be chased so hard. It took most of the RU players who came to RL - even the good ones like Botica, Davies, Inga - months and months just to reach club standard, while some - Jon Gallagher, Andy Powell (!!) - never made it at all.
I'm not trying to trash the work you do in RU, but the more your lot chase our top stars, offering frankly ridiculous money, the more desperate they look.
And regardless of that, if you're looking for sympathy or understanding, you're in the wrong place. Unlike the RU defections to RL, which were done on a club-by-club basis and could often be construed as giving unemployed men a job, these defections - which are targeted at the absolute cream of our crop and funded to a ludicrous extent by a central governing body (something RL never did, as the clubs would have gone ballistic) - are going to destroy our current status. So please don't give us any guff about "we want to win the World Cup". For our part, we'd just like to see the kids we've used money and know-how developing into superstars benefiting our struggling game, not aiding and abetting the clueless English RU.
All this applies to the NRL too, by the way, who are actually even worse than your lot because they don't even need the players they are constantly tapping up.