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Thread: Potential new Sky TV deal

  1. #176
    In The North Stand With All The Old Folk
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    It’s an interesting debate, and I have no doubt if you asked the RFU or Premiership if they’d want Saints, Wigan and Leeds in their game they’d say yes. The three clubs would punch their weight and be wealthier than they’ve ever been. But that would ignore history, culture, etc, which at the moment outweigh any financial positives I would imagine. I think any potential merger of rules would still favour RU more than us, but there are some in RU who have openly questioned how to make their game more exciting and open, whilst there are some in RL who decry the loss of specialists on the park such as scrum halves and loose forwards. You combine the complaints and there is some common ground there, but it would still be a stretch to combine them enough to make everybody happy. An open merger of sports with a new authority, a new tv partner, a new set of rules etc is one thing, but as it stands a merger would simply be our biggest clubs being co-opted into Union, and we’d never stand for that as fans.

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    Quote Originally Posted by mufcsaint View Post
    Do you honestly think and League fan would go and watch if we turned to union ?
    The easy retort to this is that support for British RL appears to be dwindling so the sport is hardly attracting the punters it needs.

  3. #178
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    There’s absolutely no way Union has any interest in bringing in a handful of League teams. They’re lightyears ahead of us as a sport and have no reason to take teams or cobble the two sports together. They’ll amend their rules and make the “sport” closer to ours by taking and tweaking the rules we have.
    St Helens Rugby League Football Club

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    Quote Originally Posted by Dos Cervezas View Post
    There’s absolutely no way Union has any interest in bringing in a handful of League teams.

    Very true, especially when the main thing that would be attractive to RU would be the fanbases of those clubs, and the majority of those fanbases would walk away if the clubs began playing RU. I'd rather watch American f***ing Football than rugby union.

  5. #180
    In The North Stand With All The Old Folk Belgian Saint's Avatar
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    I don't think there is a cat in hells chance of a hybrid game. RU are interested in the 6 Nations the World Cup and tests against NZ, Aus and ZA. None of those are going to accept rule changes to accommodate 3-4 RL teams. I also don't think we have the forwards to compete in RU. Big Al might make a number 8 Knowles could possibly, but not likely, go to hooker. The rest are either not big enough or too old to change.

  6. #181
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    Quote Originally Posted by Belgian Saint View Post
    I don't think there is a cat in hells chance of a hybrid game. RU are interested in the 6 Nations the World Cup and tests against NZ, Aus and ZA. None of those are going to accept rule changes to accommodate 3-4 RL teams. I also don't think we have the forwards to compete in RU. Big Al might make a number 8 Knowles could possibly, but not likely, go to hooker. The rest are either not big enough or too old to change.
    This is obviously the major factor. The other major nations that play either code would be completely opposed. The French, the Australians, the South Africans, the New Zealanders, the Irish etc will feel zero need for a hybrid game. The All Blacks and the NZ Super Rugby teams don't need any RL input, neither do South African Super Rugby sides, neither do the French club RU sides, neither do the Irish provincial teams, and I'm not sure there'd be much support in Wales either. In the opposite direction, the NRL would struggle to see any point in ceding ground to RU. We'd be doing it in isolation to answer a question that not many people had asked.

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    In The North Stand With All The Old Folk The Wee Waa Womble's Avatar
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    The RFU would rather see professional rugby league die than create some hybrid version that wouldn’t be recognised by any other country.
    Forwards win games. The backs decide by how much.

  8. #183
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    Quote Originally Posted by The Wee Waa Womble View Post
    The RFU would rather see professional rugby league die than create some hybrid version that wouldn’t be recognised by any other country.





    Quite right, the truth of the matter is that they don’t need us. With the high profile of the union game they would have nothing to gain with a venture like that.

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    Quote Originally Posted by The Wee Waa Womble View Post
    The RFU would rather see professional rugby league die

    You could have just left it at that.

    They've been plotting our destruction since 1895.

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    In The North Stand With All The Old Folk The Wee Waa Womble's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Webbo Again View Post
    You could have just left it at that.

    They've been plotting our destruction since 1895.
    They don’t have to do anything other than leave us to our own devices it seems.
    Forwards win games. The backs decide by how much.

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    Quote Originally Posted by The Wee Waa Womble View Post
    They don’t have to do anything other than leave us to our own devices it seems.



    Sadly true (although I've followed this sport for 37 years and we've always lurched from one crisis to another)

  12. #187
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    I've never given any credence whatsoever to the idea of a RL/RU merger.

    I can see why it comes up, because there seems to be a logic to it: the two games compete with one another for both a fan base and a player base, and generally split resources that if pooled together would be able to achieve far more than either code can in its own right. So on the supply side of the economic equation it makes sense.

    The problem is the demand side of the equation. Who wants a merged game? Nobody. Not RU fans, not RL fans. Even if it was a merger in name only, and really just RU swallowing up RL's clubs, they wouldn't be getting those clubs as they exist now: what would St Helens's fan base be if it suddenly became a RU club? About 1-2000? One can only speculate, but I can't imagine many sticking with the club. It would become a financial basket case overnight.

    If this utopian (dystopian for me) vision of a unified rugby ever came about, you would end up with an even more fragmented landscape than we have now, because you'd very quickly end up with three codes of rugby: RL and RU rebuilt from the grass roots by fans of those sports, and a hybrid code that nobody is interested in.

  13. #188
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dux View Post
    I've never given any credence whatsoever to the idea of a RL/RU merger.

    I can see why it comes up, because there seems to be a logic to it: the two games compete with one another for both a fan base and a player base, and generally split resources that if pooled together would be able to achieve far more than either code can in its own right. So on the supply side of the economic equation it makes sense.

    The problem is the demand side of the equation. Who wants a merged game? Nobody. Not RU fans, not RL fans. Even if it was a merger in name only, and really just RU swallowing up RL's clubs, they wouldn't be getting those clubs as they exist now: what would St Helens's fan base be if it suddenly became a RU club? About 1-2000? One can only speculate, but I can't imagine many sticking with the club. It would become a financial basket case overnight.

    If this utopian (dystopian for me) vision of a unified rugby ever came about, you would end up with an even more fragmented landscape than we have now, because you'd very quickly end up with three codes of rugby: RL and RU rebuilt from the grass roots by fans of those sports, and a hybrid code that nobody is interested in.
    I think this sums up the position precisely. I was brought up in a rugby union hotbed and played the game for over 40 years while I moved to St Helens nearly 50 years ago and discovered the joys of watching live rugby league as opposed to listening to Eddie Waring’s parody of northern life. As a consequence, I enjoy both the technical aspects of forward play in union and the simpler delights of league, whether that be the flowing game of Saints as “the Entertainers” or steely defence such as on display in the recent Grand Final. Nevertheless, I view them as two very distinct sports and the prospect of creating a hybrid game holds no attraction to me whatsoever (nor would it if the forward pass was legalised even though I also like American Football). There is no way a hybrid cannot take away some fundamental aspect of each game that currently matters to the respective fan bases, resulting in almost certain alienation of both.

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