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Thread: How To Grow The International Game

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    Default How To Grow The International Game

    For my part, serious investment in grassroots in other areas, time, patience and avoiding mirage projects like dumping a team with absolutely no history in a place with next to zero organic support for the game would be a start.

    Shame the Celtic thread was closed. I guess some people can't handle others having different opinions to them or accepting offers to agree to differ. You'd think they'd ignore it if they didn't like it but how and ever.

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    In The South Stand KentishBarry's Avatar
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    A good start would be consistency from the authorities. Games planned well in advanced.
    Maybe invite a touring side to play against selected domestic clubs like in the good old days? They used to be very well attended games.
    Bring back GB (Call it GB and Ireland if it helps) to complete with the big guns.
    Promote Toulouse to SL. IIRC one of the reasons Catalan was admitted was to give the French RL a boost, but we still need more French players playing at the top level.

    That's just some random 'off the top of my head' stuff from me. Obviously, all these suggestions would throw up various difficulties of one sort or another, the main one being disruption to the domestic programme, not to mention Sky (or whoever is covering us in future).

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    Competent management would be a start, until you have that everything else is pointless.

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    Personally I would just call it "the Lions" like they pretty much do in union. If needs be to differentiate it from union, another name could be chosen. I don't see why politics can't be avoided in these names but that's a long and potentially hot topic. Personally I wouldn't have an issue with "the Lions" as I don't have one with the union version. However, I'm not going to stand in people's way or do anything other than completely ignore the team as I've always done if it were to be pushed more. I would hope that's seen as a matter of personal choice and opinion though.

    The touring clubs idea is really good and something the Lions do still in union. I wonder could any traction be gained by getting tier 2 and tier 3 nations to play clubs? Some of those matches could be competitive and again it's something union does. I think you're absolutely right about the TV and I think it's something perhaps unique about league where the international game holds little interest for TV and so it is being allowed to wither and die. Maybe it's time to take the hit of short term loss for long term gain though I don't know if the sport could cope with that unfortunately.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Tomsepho View Post
    Competent management would be a start, until you have that everything else is pointless.
    In what sense? Coaching or organising?

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    Quote Originally Posted by The Heretic View Post
    In what sense? Coaching or organising?
    Organising and publicising, there was hardly any publicity about the Lions tour last year, it was almost an afterthought, compare that to how Union promotes their Lions tours, its publicised massively and organised long in advance. The fact that Nigel Wood has only left the IRL recently shows how incompetent the management of the sport has been.

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    In The North Stand With All The Old Folk The Wee Waa Womble's Avatar
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    As I posted in the other thread, a long term cohesive and cooperative plan across all federations to get all teams meaningful competitive international rugby. Not cobbling stuff together for the end of a season at the last minute.
    Forwards win games. The backs decide by how much.

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    One of the problems is where do you fit an international tournament or tour into the schedule.

    If we wanted next year's World Cup to have pride of place then we should have had a break in the middle of both the Aussie season and the Super League season so games could have been played in summer instead of November evenings.
    I doubt if the Aussie clubs would have agreed to that.

    As it is it's end of season a few weeks after the Grand Final, how many of Saints or Wigan players would have been fit for it had it been this year.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Tomsepho View Post
    Organising and publicising, there was hardly any publicity about the Lions tour last year, it was almost an afterthought, compare that to how Union promotes their Lions tours, its publicised massively and organised long in advance. The fact that Nigel Wood has only left the IRL recently shows how incompetent the management of the sport has been.
    Union Lions tours are massive. They start advertising travel packages for the next one before the current one has ended.

    Quote Originally Posted by Infamous Grouse View Post
    One of the problems is where do you fit an international tournament or tour into the schedule.

    If we wanted next year's World Cup to have pride of place then we should have had a break in the middle of both the Aussie season and the Super League season so games could have been played in summer instead of November evenings.
    I doubt if the Aussie clubs would have agreed to that.

    As it is it's end of season a few weeks after the Grand Final, how many of Saints or Wigan players would have been fit for it had it been this year.
    Union world cup is played during domestic European season. The French even have an expression for the players who fill gaps in their clubs during that, the Autumn internationals and the 6N; doublons. Of course, it would involve clubs having to release players from SL and NRL but it would be shortsighted to say that isn't a union issue too particularly with the power of English and French clubs. To my knowledge, France played a very young second string yesterday because the clubs said "enough, we want our guys back".

    There's an argument to say clubs play too many games. In a 12 team league, why is any more than 22 games per club needed? 16 makes it trickier but then they don't have a cup. Money talks though and those extra games aren't going to be given up easily.

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