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Oh you pessimistic pommies..
All you need is 13 men on the day who think they can win.

If sport was only statistics then India would have been the dominant cricketing nation for the last few decades.

The way you run down your own players (and the game itself) simply because of your chip-on-shoulder attitude is frankly unbelievable

Easy for you to say, try watching 30 years of dissapointment!

JB Down Under wrote:

Easy for you to say, try watching 30 years of dissapointment!

He's got a point though

FFA wrote:

i'd love to get rid of the poor teams in SL which just makes so many games a dire spectacle and with a rise in high intensity games we'd hopefully see an improvement in the national team. Get rid of your wakefields, hull kr (who are one of the worst for bringing over average aussies), london, widnes and stick em into the second division with clubs their own size who they can compete with using their academies

Just who do you think you are? get rid of poor teams, thats four teams you have named one of wich has finished in the top 8 for the last three seasons, who do you sugest replaces them or if it is ten teams? do you dump another couple of sides when they finish at the bottom or have a poor season.
Have you considered that the game you seem to think is dire is brought about by the rules that we now play to? I happen to like the game but how can reducing the number of sides improve the sport or do you just care about your own entertainment? Also where do you think the suporters of those sides go? I doubt we would follow an other side or rush to pay for SKY once our sides are gone. The reason England/GB are years behind the NRL is down to one thing only & that is that the people down under support & pay for League in the UK we are a minority sport that the vast majority know little about & those that do follow can not be bothered to turn up in anything like the numbers that are required to attract sponsors cash or meaningfull TV exposure.

Big Ask wrote:

The answer is simple


Make Garry Scholfield the RL Supremo

Thing is though would he want the job? As talented as he was he tends to keep himself to himself and doesn't have many opinions on the modern game.

Lockyer4President! wrote:

Oh you pessimistic pommies..
All you need is 13 men on the day who think they can win.

Well said.

People back home believe that the aussies have far superior coaching, training, conditioning etc. etc. Which is an absolute myth. Yet people will argue the case despite the fact that they haven't been coached or trained in Oz at an aussie club. We have to have a reason for why we lose series, not tests, and the answer they come up with is "they must have better etc. etc."

If only we realised that a lot more people play it in Oz and the numbers of gifted players is far greater. They get 17 players on a park that can beat our 17 more than we have them since 1970. The aussies have a lot more to choose from.

Then we can drop the "aussies are superior" nonsense and believe we can win.

On a positive note, remember Australia hasn't beaten GB in Sydney for a decade now.

TheElectricGlidingWarrior wrote:

Thing is though would he want the job? As talented as he was he tends to keep himself to himself and doesn't have many opinions on the modern game.

I wouldn't want to distract him from curing cancer and ending world peace, we have to put Schofield pbuh above the mere good of our game.

Rooster Booster wrote:

People back home believe that the aussies have far superior coaching, training, conditioning etc. etc. Which is an absolute myth.

I think at a SL level the back room facilities are not significantly different to the NRL, with a first grade squad there are only so many physios, dieticians and strength coaches you actually need, and whether the club has it's own gym or uses subscriptions to a private health club the access to equipment and professional trainers is not going to be materially different, so money really can only buy so much in that respect. Where the difference comes in is at the lower levels of the game, where the investment in equipment, facilities and coaching is missing, and that feeds through. Unless picked up by a SL club youth set-up at an early stage it is unlikely a player will progress to first grade, and we don't have a wide enough base of grass roots clubs with excellent coaching facilities to prime the pump.

Kelvin's Ferret wrote:

I think at a SL level the back room facilities are not significantly different to the NRL, with a first grade squad there are only so many physios, dieticians and strength coaches you actually need, and whether the club has it's own gym or uses subscriptions to a private health club the access to equipment and professional trainers is not going to be materially different, so money really can only buy so much in that respect. Where the difference comes in is at the lower levels of the game, where the investment in equipment, facilities and coaching is missing, and that feeds through. Unless picked up by a SL club youth set-up at an early stage it is unlikely a player will progress to first grade, and we don't have a wide enough base of grass roots clubs with excellent coaching facilities to prime the pump.

Spot on. Sadly, at lower level, much of the coaching is rubbish.

JB Down Under wrote:

Didn't say the whole team was made up of Union imports but it was supplemented by imports, especially in the backline.

1. Alan Tait
2. Martin Offiah
3. Scott Gibbs
4. John Deveraux
5.
6. Joanthin Davies
7. David Bishop

Not a bad International top up from that era!

Alan Tait - not in the same class as Hamson or Chris Bibb
John Devereaux - very naive - reponsible for Oz winning at Wembley in '92 when Renouf made him look like a monkey
David Bishop
I'll give you Scott Gibbs and Davies - both excellent converts, Davies possibly the best I've seen since Lewis Jones. Offiah was quick. Once he stopped being quick his career was over.