That's quite a CV he boasts, which makes his ignorance all the more impressive, and his moaning all the more petulent

That has to be one of the finest disections of RU Vs RL i have heard in a while and i know you only scratched the surface. Nice one, my faith in southstander is returned from exile.

He's clearly yearning for the days when international Rugby Union matches consisted of 60 scrums a game ...

That is the one thing that divides RU, the inability of forwards to release their grip on the "old ways" when forwards saw themselves as being the main playmakers in the game and the backs were called "the ladies".



Despite the law changes last year and all the efforts of the ERU to open up the game and make it more attractive and simpler to understand for new spectators, you still see the same old forwards running the ball over the top of a maul straight into the next power struggle, and on and on up the pitch yard by yard - the enlightened teams play that for four or five movements, draw in half of the opposition then throw the ball out wide, the rest just plod on regardless.

Too true, plus I'm old enough to remember a game in the 60s when the then Welsh scrum half Clive Rowlands just kicked the ball up & down the touch line for line out after line out. How boring was that?

The problem as I see it is that the modern game - dependent as it is on penalty kicks - produces close games that seem exciting for solely that reason.

How on earth RU has the cheek to complain about RL scrums really grates too.

Sadly, an open game game of RU can be an exciting spectacle, fortunately for RL that doesn't happen too often.

Perhaps the most damming evidence against Union is the old Mitchell & Kenyon films that were taken at the turn of the 19th / 20th Century.



Of course, during those days 'Rugby League' was still playing to 'Union' rules post the 1895 split.



Go 65 years in to the future and Rugby Union (where an international during the 60s had 60+ scrums during the course of the game) looked more or less the same as the M & K films. Meanwhile RL, even with the no-six-tackle rule er, didn't ....



The game had seen sense, pretty much as soon as it twigged that it needed punters coming through the door to make the game pay, got rid of a sucession of stupid rules that were killing the game as a spectacle.



League scrums ?







Union Line Outs

I actually enjoy watching RU line outs, not that I'd wish to see them in RL.

But I think (as your picture showed) they are very technical, requiring great skill & bottle & normally get the ball back into play much more quickly than scrums.

I can't help but think that if they didn't throw the ball so high they'd all have a chance of catching it.

Or just throw it to the bloke right infront of the lineout? No one would suspect that.

Piggy in the middle just got serious.

Whilst lifting always went on covertly, they've just made it a joke now by having one nominated catcher that goes about 11 feet up ....

They do get the ball back in play fairly quickly but it leads to specialised back and 2nd rowers whose 1 and only job is to be in the lineout and are subsequently unable to run, catch, pass or tackle.



The biggest step forward Union could take is to do away with the lineouts as then they could have mobile 2nd rowers who can actually do something in the rest of the game.