PY I'm with you on this.
The top five was the best reward system.

The WCC is a difficult one, but I would go with three teams, the two Grand Finalists and the Challenge Cup Winners, although I'm not sure how the Aussies would chose their third team.

You could also use a top four system, straight knockout 1 v 4, 2 v 3.

The hard part is getting the Aussies to buy into it. It would need a very big sponsor.

It's so obvious that this is true.

This is something we should really try to throw our weight behind. It's one of the few flagship events RL has, and one that Union would really struggle to match, especially if we expanded it the way you suggest.

But you're right about the Aussies. As long as they continue to pay nothing more than lip-service to the game's international dimension, we'll never get this thing moving.

The game is dying, the way things are going we are going to move back to being a semi professional sport with only maybe one or two clubs being able to be full time professional like in the late 80s and early 90s and I am sure none of us want to go back and repeat that dismal era for the sport.

That has the added benefit of making decent players in SL actually consider Catalans as a serious option, i couldn't believe Pryce was the first to go over and it took as long as it did.

What does surprise me considering Australia's appetite for rugby is that they don't actually outbid Sky and buy the rights to SL.

The Qantas Superleague or such like, possibly attach themselves to a club similar to all the SL clubs linking up with Championship clubs.

If Sky wanted to they could double or treble what they pay for SL without even noticing. It's peanuts compared to what they spend on football and RL is their 2nd most watched sport isn't it? If they want to keep that audience paying their overpriced sports subscriptions to subsidise the cost of screening football then they need to support the sport better. It's clearly not in their interests to let SL go right downhill, I just hope they wake up to that soon.