All I’m saying is… if that’s really the case then why are you so fussed about clashes between rep games and club fixtures? Why if the League player group is so deep is it a problem to take the top 4 or 5 players for each club for a week? Surely those awesome juniors of yours should be able to fill in no problems, and not make for ‘half baked’ teams on those weeks (your words not mine)… I’m just raising an inconsistency between yourr logic today and what you were telling us about the depth of RL all last year.

Now with your idea of the City / Country matches yes very good but play them the 1st weekend, along with maybe a couple of Tests from PNG,Fiji, and Tonga Samoa, to fill the weekend gap, on the next 3 wednesday’s,, allowing players to recover for these games rather than having only 2 days 1st weekend, like you mentioned the build-up would be intense. If we had the Sunday games it would only allow players 2 days to recover before they had to go into battle. So we have 3 weekends to fill up with other International games, surely we could easily do this, turn these games into a permanent fixture and rotate stadiums from where origin will be played so fans have a good international game to attend.

The bottom line is we need to build our international games, lets do this. I just heard the Bunnies have signed Crocker, and looks like he will be playing origin, At some stage.

But I do thoroughly agree with your discussions on fixtures, I think the NRL could do much better and are currently shooting themselves in the foot with the way they schedule games.

One final thing to Oikee… we’ve heard you for so long defend the depth of the game, the juniors coming through, the Toyota Cup, how it doesn’t matter that Gasnier and SBW leave because their spots get filled with young talent coming through… why then the inconsistency with your comments here on ‘half-baked teams’? Surely if I am to believe what you’ve said before a million times, then even if a Test match, a City V Country AND a SOO match were on all at the same time then Rugby League is so deep that the clubs could draw on their hundreds of genius juniors and no-one would even tell the difference because of all that talent supposedly coming through… or in fact are you now admitting that the talent in the comp nowhere as deep as you’d wanted us to believe?

The City Country should have been on Anzac day.

Oikee, “you’re an ideas man….”

Oikee, check out http://www.theroar.com.au/2009/05/04/making-city-country-mean-something/ – I wrote the artcile for Monday just gone…

[Ed: Sometimes links in comments means they go through to our spam folder. We've recovered your comments Brett.]

I’ve also sent it onto the Sunday Roast as a starting point, and depending how that goes, I’ll try dave@nrl.com!!

Now my plan left out the mid-year Test, but maybe you could slot that in on its own weekend too, and play the Indigenous-Maori game, or a Polynesian reg game on the Fri night??

As was discussed on a another thread recently – it ceased being a true trial to aid selection a long, long time ago, and the authorities are doing little here to disguise their contempt for the game!

It now is nothing more than a bone being tossed to the provinces.

What we need is someone who can bother enough to sit down and work out a proper schedule. Now is this to hard for the guys in charge, if it is then we need to let them go and get me or the dog down the road to do this. Its not rocket science, its just a matter of having someone come up with a plan to help grow the international games and other fixtures. I keep saying get rid of the dinosaurs, i will keep saying this until someone acts on what i say. Until we do this the game is stuck in the dark ages.