Sorry but it's been 30+ years since we won a tournement against Oz. There have been a mix of styles and numbers of teams in the league in that time.
A reduction of SL teams IMHO is very short term and will lead to no increase in the standard of player. It will simply redistribute the current standard of player through a narrower selection of clubs.
But please someone volunteer to exit Saints from the league and I will take this arguement seriously. It's a money grab exersize plain and simple. Same as any walk of life where there are limited resources some members of society will resort to theiving to take more than the share they are entitled to. The big teams are now seeing that they can't buy up all the talent, eg in years gone by we would never have had Castleford competing with Saints to keep Edmondson. The bigger teams don't like this as they are having to make better recruitment choices rather than just having the natural advantage of more spending power.
The natural result of less in the competition will be less teams producing players to play in the competition. The quota system has only been refitted in the last 5 years and it's now impacting. But even now we still have players under the old system as Manu shows they will not be cleared out of the system for sometime yet.
In 2007 we had 12 teams, we did not beat the Austrailians and we still managed to nil Hull KR 40- 0. Beat Huddersfield 54 - 4. London 44- 6. A reduction in teams did not stop oned sided battles because they are part of sport when one team turns up underdone and the other team is ready for a battle royale.
That same team we hammered mid season, where good enough to beat us earlier on in the year, just as in 2007 London beat us earlier on in the league 14- 6.
Increasing the quality of the competition cannot be done with a quick fix, as you are talking about a turnover of 420 players. In 5 years we have not yet cleared out all quota players, it's taken 10 years of the cap and not every club is at full spend yet. So when you start seeing those time scales you will see how long it will take to increase standards across the board of homegrown talent, rather than clubs using the old method of short term fixes to nip abroad and drag anyone in under what ever loop hole they could find. As we saw the nipping abroad may have filled holes in your club side but did nothing for team GB or England in the last 30 years.
I would also say the team GB(england) struggles as it lags behind the domestic competition. A good example of this is Leeds having so many in the exiles match coming up where as Warrington have so few. Yes Leeds where champions last year but they did finish 5th. They had lost twice as many games as the league leaders over the course of the season.
I think the playoffs are great in terms of spinning out money and interest for other clubs, but as a measure of a team it is a poor measure. It requires 3 to 4 games as opposed to a whole season. Even the Aussies don't use the playoffs to pick their side. The make their picks based on season form, to pick for SOO, which then narrows down the national side.
