bramleyrhino wrote:
Personally, those clubs need to realise that opportunities to make money don't just exist on 13 weekends in the summer. The game has bigger opportunities to exploit.
The World Cup showed me just how much I enjoyed elite international rugby. The England v NZ semi final, infront of £60k at Wembley was an amazing event. I want to pay good money for more of that.
Unfortunately, I'm not allowed. Because some clubs insist on making people watch more of Wakefield v London or Salford v Castleford instead, arguably at the expense of a proper, quality rep calendar.
It's completely backwards.
Although I understand what you are saying, we only have 3 international teams that significant numbers of supporters would pay to go and see.
What sort of international programme do you want ?
They could of course extend the WCC to incorporate the top 2,3 or 4 clubs from England and Aus and people would pay to see this, but, we would need the Aussies on board and this would widen the gap still further between the top 4 and the rest.
Unless the top 10 in SL want to play each other 3 times a season (plus cup games & play offs) we can only tinker with the format.
Just going back to "The Big Hit", the first game was utterly superb but, equally, the second game was awful and was played in front of an empty stadium.
The only solution long term is to help the French develop into a competitive RL nation.
