The Virtual Terrace • Re: No Helmets Required
Him wrote:
The clubs. But that’s a non-argument in my opinion. Where do the clubs get their income from? The fans, sponsors and the TV deal. Leeds playing Wigan or Cas a third, fourth, fifth or even sixth time in a season isn’t going to bring any more fans or sponsors into the game nor is it going to increase the tv deal.
The clubs are sticking themselves to a vicious circle of fighting over a few quid now that doesn’t in any way help invest in the future. Internationals do. And would bring bigger gains to the clubs in the future.
Union saw this decades ago and the clubs regularly sacrifice the loss of their players because they see the huge benefits it can bring.
We have to prioritise the international game, it’s the only time we ever become even slightly relevant to the rest of the country.
People outside RL areas naturally don’t relate to Castleford or St Helens etc most people won’t even know these places exist, why would they? There’s still a lingering recognition of Wigan from their famous run and also from the football team but even the cities of Leeds and Hull don’t inspire relevance to someone living in Gloucester say. They’re just relatively small sports teams from a city up north. There’s nothing for anyone outside RL to grasp hold of and relate to. When England play that is reversed. And a lot of the issues and struggles we have in getting media attention and cut through to people outside RL are solved simply by England playing in front of a good crowd on the BBC. Get that more regularly and we’ll start to see an uptick in acknowledgement across the country. It’s a slow process but we have to start it at some point. Unfortunately Union stoke a march on us 30+ years ago and we’ve been busy wasting time effort and money on short term rubbish since.
The clubs can feel better in the short term with an extra few K in their balance and so they can go and buy another Aussie but in 5 years time e’ll be back with the same issues and just 5 years wasted bumbling along with a load of clubs desperate to be the biggest fish regardless of the fact the pond has become a puddle.
Problem with most of your argument is the belief that the strength in international sides of good enough to capture the attention on tv broadcasters. Yes the NZ series did good and Aus will do too over here at prime times but playing 2nd tier teams won’t nor will away fixtures played at 5/6am.
A key reason why the England RU international calendar works is because they have competitive Northern Hemisphere teams to compete against and those Northern Hemisphere countries all have competitive club sides.
That’s a key problem in RL, that some people think we can grow other NH international teams just by playing them once or twice a year at international level without those countries having prominent club sides like Wales and Ireland do in RU
You can exaggerate about SOME clubs POSSIBLY playing each other 4/5 times but that’s a lame argument. Of course more fixtures bring the clubs more money through sponsors and tv deals etc. so why should they turn them down in favour of 2nd tier International teams who tv aren’t interested in....did BBC pick up the Eng vs Fra game recently? No. We obviously could play Aus and NZ more but let’s see you or anyone else have any luck in talking the NRL into making space to fit those games in.
Statistics: Posted by ThePrinter — Fri Dec 14, 2018 1:49 am