The Virtual Terrace • Future of the Game

Interesting comment. When you think about it when the English SL clubs each have half a dozen players or more in their first team all from the NRL that are largely the NRL's surplus, i.e. not quite good enough or no longer good enough for NRL, or just too old or have legally offended then what sort of English professional RL player pool do we have here?

One that could only realistically support only half a dozen professional clubs with aspirations to play at a standard somewhere near (but not near enough) the NRL.

So when we have had Catalans, Toronto and Toulouse in the here and now and New York and Ottawa if they came in failing to develop any top class RL players at all, and trying to sign players out of an already inadequate pool here how is this "expansion".

In the wonderful world of "Expansionists" how is it what few quality RL players we produce here, and what few quality (or reducing in quality as age and knocks take their toll) Australians we have access to should be taken from here and moved to places Rugby Union completely dominate like the North of America and the south of France is somehow progressing and expanding the game of Rugby League

This incredible myopia (nay blindness) is amazing in that the introduction of an overseas clubs to SL at the expense of M62 clubs somehow becomes "expansion"

But all I have ever seen that has expanded is air miles travel, and the distance between clubs which puts costs up and excludes away fans at a heavy financial loss.

How this utter nonsense is supported by the should know better editors and Journo's of such as TRL and League Weekly I just don't know?

Are their circulations boosted by sending thousands of copies to Ottawa and Perpignan??