Roar Guru
Joined August 2015
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If international rugby league were to issue US Presidential style ‘State of the Union’ addresses, one can only imagine that new Chairman Scott Carter…
The 2017 season has been a challenging and revealing one for Australian rugby. The Wallabies respectable performance in the Rugby Championship aside, the year…
Today rugby league and heavy metal tragic Steve Mascord penned an article explaining why he's “brushing the rugby league Test.” But reading his article…
Recently an article by journalist Antoinette Muller was brought to my attention in which she detailed the plight of rugby league and the difficulty…
Rugby union isn't exactly in rude health at the moment, but at a time when the NRL is signing multi-billion dollar deals and thinking…
Even if they are, so what? They didn’t need to be.
Wallabies' RWC hopes still alive after wild win over Portugal - but it will take a miracle to avoid historic first flop
That makes the case very difficult. It was hell in NSW just to get Allianz rebuilt – and that has a fantastic business case thanks to it having the Roosters, Waratahs, Sydney FC as tennents (and likely Souths soon as well), plus hosting the Wallabies. Build a stadium that locks out everyone but the A-League and you’ll never get tax payers on board unless the A-League want to pay for it themselves.
'Nothing short of a disgrace': Lack of football-specific venues is holding the A-Leagues back
Another unconvincing win over a semi-professional side. The All Blacks are out there putting almost a century on Italy – a side that competes with the heavy weights in the 6N each year – whilst the Wallabies are just looking more and more like they don’t belong in top tier competitions.
Wallabies' RWC hopes still alive after wild win over Portugal - but it will take a miracle to avoid historic first flop
What is the difference between a “football specific” stadium and the many many rectangular stadiums that already exist across the country? You can play the A-League perfectly at any of the existing rectangular stadia and from what I can tell the only thing you could do to make them friendlier to soccer would be to make them smaller, thus cutting out the prospect of use by League/Union due to the safety issues it creates.
'Nothing short of a disgrace': Lack of football-specific venues is holding the A-Leagues back
It was a workman like win over Georgia – not exactly a powerhouse rugby nation. The Wallabies will need to beat some credible opposition before we start drawing conclusions as to whether they’re as disappointing as we all have thought.
Remember us? The soft reminder the Wallabies remain a RWC threat - and the one selection headache for Fiji
The only thing that has been pathetic has been the response of England’s players, media and fans. We all know only too well that if the shoe were on the other foot they’d just be telling us to suck it up and calling us sooks. But because they’re 2 nil down and had assumed they’d be 2 nil up, their born to rule attitude has them reaching for any excuse in sight for how they could be behind despite being at home and apparently the saviours of international test cricket.
UK View: 'He didn't look like a leader. He looked pathetic' - Cummins caned but Poms also skewer 'dozy' Bairstow
What an absolute load of nonsense. Bairstow had attempted the exact same thing and McCullum famously was guilty of a more blatant instance of exploiting the same rule.
The pearl clutching moralising of some over this is frankly ridiculous.
COMMENT: Cummins failed the moral test and tarnished these Ashes. He had the chance to be a legend and blew it
Turbo is made of glass more brittle than Billy Smith… just a horror run.
Blues star Tom Trbojevic forced off after three minutes - Freddy's plan B blows up in his face
The core thing Qld have had is their spine has been consistent and largely intact. You can shift a lot of other players around, but your attack isn’t worth much without a cohesive spine. So yeah, blessed.
Origin II: Axe set to fall on Fittler after Slater’s Maroons commit Blue murder to win series as three players get sent off
Nah, you can check my comment history. Called it as soon as I saw the team.
Origin II: Axe set to fall on Fittler after Slater’s Maroons commit Blue murder to win series as three players get sent off
What part of that was an excuse? I was arguing some of those Qld “underdog” sides were genuinely good and undermined by objectively classy spines.
Origin II: Axe set to fall on Fittler after Slater’s Maroons commit Blue murder to win series as three players get sent off
There’s been one or two famous series where Qld pulled it out of the fire with a team of “no names”, but for the most part a lot of those claims are beat ups. Even in the recent “worst Qld side ever” of 2020 you had Munster and DCE and a still very in form Jake Friend as the nucleus of the spine through the whole series.
Origin II: Axe set to fall on Fittler after Slater’s Maroons commit Blue murder to win series as three players get sent off
Agreed. NSW had a horror injury run, whilst Qld were clearly blessed, but Freddy made a hard situation worse by making mind numbingly stupid decisions for his selections and sending out a side that appeared almost as if they hadn’t trained together… they were just awful
Origin II: Axe set to fall on Fittler after Slater’s Maroons commit Blue murder to win series as three players get sent off
This is more or less the scoreline I predicted after seeing the team Freddy selected. Just a terrible spine – up there with some of our worst since the Mitchell Pearce era. Freddy was going into a must win clash against a spine that has been fairly consistent for 5 years with a new halves combination, a very out of form FB and a starting hooker that is better as a 14.
True, injuries to Cleary, Latrell, Api et al hurt a lot and Qld were relatively blessed with the good health of their spine, but there was an obvious solution in Reynolds and Walker, where you had a ready made combination.
Origin II: Axe set to fall on Fittler after Slater’s Maroons commit Blue murder to win series as three players get sent off
I have seen that, but TBH I reckon that’s an exercise in pissing into the wind. AFL just has no chance of taking off in NZ. The fact that it has “Australian Rules” in the name just makes it a non starter to any kiwi I’ve ever met 😂
Steve Hansen claims 'NRL's a better game to watch' than 'predictable' Super Rugby, backs RA plans to 'jazz it up'
The problems with Australian Rugby are MUCH deeper than that. Heck, even during the brief flash in the pan wins by Australian SR sides that the ratings still struggle to hit average NRL levels. Even when the Tahs won in 2014 the were still only get the stadium 3/4 full for their historic home GF.
Steve Hansen claims 'NRL's a better game to watch' than 'predictable' Super Rugby, backs RA plans to 'jazz it up'
Union’s problem is that it isn’t the NRL that it loses most of its fans to anyway – many are actually converts to the AFL. The fact that Union people don’t understand this is a little mind blowing TBH.
Steve Hansen claims 'NRL's a better game to watch' than 'predictable' Super Rugby, backs RA plans to 'jazz it up'
They’ve been winning it for 50 years though – attendance rates for soccer have always been high because it’s very safe and accessible. But as someone who grew up playing soccer because I ever played League or Union, I can attest that playing a game doesn’t necessarily make you want to watch it.
Steve Hansen claims 'NRL's a better game to watch' than 'predictable' Super Rugby, backs RA plans to 'jazz it up'
The NRL isn’t the elephant in the room for Rugby – it’s the AFL. Just look where all the local talent comes from at the Swans and Lions – they’re all old union schools. You can see it in the fan bases as well. The Swans have one of the most buttoned up WASPy fan bases in the AFL because they intentionally targeted all the Union strongholds. You could quite literally chart the growth of Swans attendances as being inversely proportional to the steady decline in people going to Waratahs games.
Steve Hansen claims 'NRL's a better game to watch' than 'predictable' Super Rugby, backs RA plans to 'jazz it up'
You’re deluding yourself cookie – and it’s not just Qld; the NRL has been hitting records for attendances this year and ratings are as strong as ever. You say that league “does a good job at promoting itself” as if it were some sort of slight, but football codes are in the entertainment business fundamentally, so if your administration is not good at promoting itself and winning engagement from fans, then either you’re garbage at your job or your product is garbage – or both.
In Union’s case, I genuinely feel it’s a case of “both”. I used to watch Union as much as I watched league, but Union has descended into less a contest, and more a long committee between officials in which they spend half the game debating every pedantic ruling you can find an excuse for making – the sport feels like a game for lawyers and bureaucrats. On top of that, whereas once it was permanently behind the fox paywall, now it’s hidden on a niche streaming service – even more out of sight and out of mind. This has followed 2 decades of straggering incompetence by Rugby in Australia in which they didn’t just lose out to the NRL, but even more troublingly had the AFL gut them from the inside without RA even realising it was happening until it was too late.
Steve Hansen claims 'NRL's a better game to watch' than 'predictable' Super Rugby, backs RA plans to 'jazz it up'
I swear Trell just doesn’t have a desire to play for NSW… I reckon he’ll be ruling himself out in years to come. This is also another thing that kills the Blues – whereas Qlders would play with a missing arm if it meant pulling on the maroon, too many Blues players just seem happy to just not bother with Origin altogether.
Losing Latrell last thing Fittler needs as battered Blues try to regroup for must-win Origin showdown
I think that’s right – which as you say gets us back to where we started and the reason for this article: that if we want to look at why international rugby league has lost its luster, then really it has a lot more to do with England (and to a certain extent the collapse of the game in France) than it does with Origin. To my mind, Origin actually demonstrates how few competitive teams you need for an engaging representative product. I am very confident that if RL had a more widespread and national presence in the UK and a history of being consistently competitive with Australia, then the RL internationals between us would easily be bigger than Origin. It’s a bit of a shame that it isn’t really… the competition between our two countries is closer in Union, but dominated heavily by England at present given the state of Union in Australia is probably even more precarious than the state of League in the UK – with one other code (the AFL) having intentionally and methodically spent the better part of the last fifteen years targeting Union’s traditional nurseries and hollowing them out whilst Union focused on a losing war with the NRL.
England’s rugby league failures are killing the international game
This is true – although it must be said that between just Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka you’re talking about 1.8 billion people – which is several hundreds of millions more people than the entire population of Europe and South America combined.
Does Australia care about the FIFA Women's World Cup?
He’s fit now apparently
'They're risks': Fittler insists he's no gambler, but admits NSW selections could backfire
I don’t think this was much a case of “the emergence of other nations” – it was just more evidence of the decline of ours… The All Blacks put 96 points on Italy, a side that beat us last year and has been in the 6N for years. Anyone that doubts the ABs, Springboks, France or Ireland wouldn’t have racked up a cricket score against Portugal or Georgia is kidding themselves. These nations aren’t “emerging” now any more than they were 15 years ago – Australia has just fallen off a cliff.
Wallabies' RWC hopes still alive after wild win over Portugal - but it will take a miracle to avoid historic first flop