Find me a union thread that I started on this VT forum?

PNG belong in either the NRL graveyard or international forum.

PNG should be at the centre of every rugby league fan's thinking, as should be France. They are at the centre of international development plans, and constitute a potential goldmine for Super League talent scouts. That is why matters pertaining to PNG and France belong in the Virtual Terrace.

PNG and France are that MASSIVE they should have their own entire website

Here GF you can watch highlights of the game at the qrl website.





The commentary is superb and the Pride have a big "Irisherman" playing for them.

You can watch a livestream of the Hunters V Easts game from 3pm Sydney/5am London time tomorrow. www.qrl.com.au/interactive/live-stream.html It should be interesting to see how the PNG forwards cope with Giant Melbourne Storm prop Mitch Garbutt.

You can watch a livestream of the Hunters V Easts game from 3pm Sydney/5am London time tomorrow. www.qrl.com.au/interactive/live-stream.html It should be interesting to see how the PNG forwards cope with Giant Melbourne Storm prop Mitch Garbutt.

Video highlights of the 20 all draw with Easts Tigers here; www.qrl.com.au/news/2014/03/31/r ... v_png.html Some good long range tries by the Hunters.

Video highlights of the 20 all draw with Easts Tigers here; www.qrl.com.au/news/2014/03/31/r ... v_png.html Some good long range tries by the Hunters.

Which is why it's a mystery to me why all these SL clubs are partnering with American RL clubs who play a tiny season with sportsmen from other games. France and PNG actually have proper RL clubs and bags of untapped talent.

I suspect that if several Super League and NRL clubs between them bought up all the talent in the PNG Hunters team for Super League 2015, the Hunters would not be too hard done by. They would still be able to recruit new talent and replace the lost players easily and field a team just as good as the current one in 2015. I suspect that NRL scouts are on the lookout at the Hunters team already, but SL clubs not.



We should also remember that a talented French teenager named Theo Fages came to Britain on his own initiative, not because Salford had scouted him.



It just requires a bit of initiative from Super League clubs' managements to see that scouting France and PNG is one new way to go to improve the SL talent pool.

If you scout the French Elite leagues you'll see that a great many of the "stars" in that comp are actually 3rd grade ANZAC/PI players. BTW, calling it the Elite comp doesn't make it Elite....kind of like the not-so-superleague



As for PNG. The Hunters are 100% full time professional players that walk, talk, sleep, eat and train with each other 24/7/52. Them being competitive in a lower tier comp where the other teams are part timers is hardly proof that SL management need to look at PNG for anything.....they recently saw the cream of both French and PNG talent here in Europe.......remind us all again how they got on?



France scored 3 tries in 4 games...Ireland scored 3 tries in 1 game!...Catalans and the Elite (sic) comp have repeatedly failed to deliver top tier talent.....and before you go on about a French player at Salford, I said top tier......not outside the play-offs.



PNG scored 5 in 3 games. The gazzillions of players they have delivered one of the worst teams at the RLWC, if not the worst.



Tonga, Samoa and Fiji offer far more in the way of talented players on the fringes of being first grade.

Alright, stop this now. You're right again.



The QLD players are indeed mainly part timers with a few full time first graders from the likes of the Cowboys and Broncos, who aren't selected being sent back to the QLD feeder clubs they have an arrangement with.



I also know a couple of aussies who went to France to play as they couldn't get s start in the NSW Cup over here. Even a Fijian international, Eloni Vunakecel is playing in France for Toulouse until he goes back to Oz to play for Wyong (with Mark O Meley) again this season.

The Hunters are only 3 months into this experiment.

They are putting some of the young talent in PNG into fulltime training and have $200k worth of gym equipment, free accommodation and all the food supliments supplied, so for the last 3 months these guys have been getting pretty much everything young Australian and English players have been getting, and they are also playing at a standard equal to or higher than the under 20s comp in Australia. They have some older guys, but they are concentrating on giving young players a chance to impress.

3 months in most of these young guys have shown they can compete against many players who have NRL experience and they can only keep improving.

That's complete rubbish. There are stacks of PNG players that have made it in SL and NRL, and there are a good number of French players that have made it in SL with the Dragons and a few elsewhere.



In a full time pro environment I think you'll get a lot more out of the best French elite league players than people in SL realise.