User:Gibson Flying V/Comparison of rugby league and rugby union


 * Rugby League is another form of rugby that’s very popular in New Zealand. It’s an adaptation that results in a faster game.


 * Owing to the great dissatisfaction with the management of the Rugby Union during the 1919 football season, and the fact that University footballers were commencing to realise that Rugby League was a faster and cleaner game, several leading members of the football club, including seven "blues" of the past season, took steps to introduce the League game into the University for the 1920 season. - Sydney University Rugby League Club's first annual report, 1920.


 * Even though rugby union is a relatively minor sport, Test five-eighth Mark Ella is better known than most Sydney League players, mainly because of the interest in international rugby union.


 * "For [ Jacques Fouroux ] the appeal lies in the fast, open nature of the game. He has already said in league the ball is in play for 60 minutes while in rugby union it is moving for a mere 25. It lends itself to television coverage." - Mike Burton


 * "...it's good getting the ball in hand so many times. In union I definitely don't touch it so many times." - John Kirwan


 * Thirteen-man rugby league has shown itself to be a faster, more open game of better athletes than the other code. Rugby union is trying to negotiate its own escape from amateurism, with some officials admitting that the game is too slow, the laws too convoluted to attract a larger TV following.


 * From 1907 Rugby League was played in Australia and a battle ensued over which code would predominate, a battle eventually won by League.
 * "I cannot recount the many days of unpaid leave I had to take for the sake of amateur rugby... Amateur rugby and especially Springbok rugby, is a game for rich men's sons. I, and others like me, could no longer afford it." - Martin Pelser
 * The incorporation of the Springboks, All Blacks and Australian Wallabies and attempts to keep players from jumping to Rugby League led to the professionalization of the game and the formation of a southern hemisphere annual Tri-Nations competition.


 * League fans who've spent their lives convinced that union is a game for poofs and pansies have seen some of their best players prove that it can be just as hard. Union fans who believed that league requires little more than brute force and ignorance ought to have been silenced by such as Gary Connolly and Jason Robinson. Spending such a short time trying to fit into an alien game in a club scene that is full of upheaval was never going to be easy for the temporary converts. Even former union men like myself have found it difficult to re-adjust. When he came back, Scott Gibbs upset people with the assessment that, compared with league, union was boring. He wasn't being rude, and I am sure it had got a lot less boring for him since, but I knew what he meant. The union game here is improving all the time but it does have dull moments, especially for the backs. You can often walk off after a match totally frustrated because you haven't made a contribution. You are dependent on others to get the ball for you. Guaranteed possession in league means that you are more in charge of your own destiny. You rarely come off a league pitch feeling you've been denied a chance to be influential. That's what can often make it a more enjoyable game to play. At its best, union is a fantastic spectacle but it is harder than league to get used to because the laws are so complex, the stoppages are so frequent and often inexplicable and the four extra players make it more crowded than you would imagine.


 * Certainly as of now Union in its current form is a game slipping down the road of League albeit a century or so later.


 * Union is getting to resemble league in some ways...
 * ...they do have one advantage over rugby union - they have a firmly established order. They cater clearly for amateurs, semi-pros and full pros. Everyone knows where and what they are. Union could learn a big lesson from that simple arrangement.


 * The six Zurich Premiership games over the last weekend saw an average of just over 4,000 people per match, and yet pick up any national newspaper and you will see match reports and previews plastered all over the place. By comparison the six Tetley's Bitter Super League games had a total of 50,000 watching - that's twice as many as watched the 15-a-side code. Yet pick up those same newspapers and you may find, at best, a single match report squashed into a corner. Is it any wonder the fans of rugby league have a chip on their shoulder?
 * Whatever argument you use, at club level rugby league is more popular than rugby union in this country. The fact that rugby union clubs are publishing their crowd figures, after years of hiding the truth, is helping prove that fact. Let's hope we see a shift in media attention to reflect the relative interests in the two sports.


 * Much of the tackling and defensive efficiency in union has come from rugby league, but that influence has yet to be followed by the skill and pace with which league attackers play. When the union backs pick up on those skills, they will find it immensely preferable to trying to bash their way through. New laws could help. When I was playing league in Australia in 1991, they brought in a rule that the player who threw the first punch was the one who went off, not the retaliator. So if someone smacked you one, you could smash him back to your heart's content and he'd still be the one to go. You'd be amazed how well it worked. You thought twice about punching if it could bring you a good hiding as well as a red card. Another solution is a more obvious one. The only sure way to create space on a rugby pitch for the runners and the sidesteppers is to reduce the teams to 14 men. It may be worth thinking about.


 * A more accurate comparison is, therefore, between free-to-air figures in the rugby codes' shared heartlands of Sydney and Brisbane. In Sydney, Channel 9's coverage of the league Test - telecast an hour after kick-off in the city - averaged 688,360 viewers (No1 for the week), while Channel 7's live telecast from Wellington of the Bledisloe averaged 433,598 (21st for the week). In Brisbane, the Great Britain Test averaged 470,934 viewers, No1 for the week, while the union averaged 307,217, 13th for the week. The Wallabies versus France union Test in Melbourne last month was outrated in Sydney by an NRL club game - the Bulldogs versus Parramatta.
 * A comparison of free-to-air figures for NRL games and Super 12 matches demonstrates that for every 12 viewers watching a league game, only one watches union.
 * Pay-TV figures reflect the same difference in popularity. NRL games on Fox average 636,154 viewers, whereas Super 12 games average 181,429 viewers.
 * "The Wallabies would have been a curiosity in a national sense some years ago but the appeal has broadened." - Strath Gordon, Australian Rugby Union.


 * "Union - well it's pretty much like League now isn't it? I would prefer that they had the old rucks back, so the backs can have a bit of room to move. I think that might make the spectacle a bit more attractive." - Trevor Allan


 * [Rugby league] has had a World Cup for 50 years, much longer than the rival code of rugby union...
 * Rugby league is like American football, a fruitful outcrop from rugby union. It broke away in 1895 over payment for players — a concept that "union," named after the administrative body that ran the sport at the time, rejected for another century.
 * League is played with 13 men, compared with union's 15, and while methods of scoring are the same, values are different.
 * League supporters point to players' speed of movement, dexterous handling and ferocious hitting — all apparent on Saturday night. The British historian Tony Collins once likened it to Yiddish, because it has never been associated with a ruling class in any of the countries where it is played.
 * League is heavily concentrated in a few regions in the Tri-Nations. Once-powerful France has fallen away and no new fourth force has arisen, although league is Papua New Guinea's national game. It is, however — as a roster including names like Tonga, Rooney, Webcke, Minichello, Buderus and Civoniceva indicates — more reflective of Australia's ethnic richness than cricket or rugby union, and it has long been more popular than union among the Pacific Islanders and Maoris of the poorest districts of New Zealand's two largest cities, Auckland and Wellington. But even if unfashionable with ruling classes, it is not invariably unpopular with individual rulers. Liking league is about the only thing John Howard, Australia's conservative prime minister, and Helen Clark, his leftish intellectual counterpart from New Zealand, have in common.


 * With England's Six Nations fortunes taking a turn for the worse, it's no surprise coach Andy Robinson is dipping into rugby league's vast reserves in an attempt to rejuvenate his lacklustre team.


 * Scrummages, rucks and mauls are very technical areas - some of the players who have played union all their lives are still struggling with the laws!
 * Rugby league is a fantastic game. Week in week out the intensity and the atmosphere at club level may be more enjoyable than the equivalent in rugby union.


 * One of the most striking visible differences Quins fans will notice when our Rugby League team takes the field is in body shape. All League players are built for power and explosive speed regardless of the position they occupy on the field. This creates a prime requirement for an ultra athletic build and aerobic conditioning whether you are a prop or a winger. The more technical and specialist roles of the Rugby Union forward often require different physical attributes of course. The thick-set, burly prop whose predominant responsibility is to scrummage is one example. There are of course exceptions, one outstanding one being Andrew Sheridan of Sale, who to me looks a powerful athlete. You wonder how much effective he would be taking the ball up if he wasn’t knackered by being pressured in the scrum constantly. However I’m sure he is the blueprint prop of the future.


 * The other aspect of this is the rule change I referred to earlier which puts an even greater burden on fitness. To me this has brought about what I believe is one of the important differences between the two codes – the defensive line must stand back at least 10 metres at every (play-the-ball). This rule was brought about to give the attacking side more room to play, get tremendous momentum going forward and be very difficult to stop. It would not surprise me to see this rule being adopted in rugby union. It would stop endless phases of play that go nowhere. 5 metres is nothing (particularly in professional sport) to get into your opponent.


 * Ballymore Tornadoes coach Chris Roche says rugby's new laws could make the game faster than rugby league - but only if coaches and players embrace the revised rules. Roche will take the wrapper off his Tornadoes when they play the East Coast Aces at Ballymore today in the opening round of the experimental Australian Rugby Championship (ARC). The competition will trial a new set of rules designed to speed up play, reduce penalties and encourage running rugby over goal kicks. Rugby has often been criticised by league fans for its dreary and overly technical ruck play, but Roche said the ability to pull mauls down and for sides to be penalised for not promoting quick ball could make the game even quicker than the 13-man version. "I do (think they can). It depends on how teams play but in rugby league, you get tackled and have the play-the-ball, however long that takes," Roche said. "In rugby union you have the ruck or a maul and that can be a pretty slow affair."
 * But he warned the new ARC clubs needed to fully embrace the ethos of the new laws, which have been partly trialled in Brisbane's club rugby competition, or risk the public being "bored to death" by more mauls and scrummages. "It depends on how teams play it because you can take a scrum or take a short-arm penalty," Roche said. "Big lumbering forwards may want to scrum the opposition to death - if they take that route they'll bore us all to death. If they take the other route it's very fast. It does depend on how coaches coach it. I think from a public and players point of view, you want to have the ball in your hands. You want to be having a crack surely. The public doesn't want 50 million technical reasons why this guy's been penalised. It makes it easier to understand and it makes it easier for the referee to referee it."


 * Rugby Union should follow the lead of rugby league and look to make significant changes to improve the game. That was the message from Australian Rugby Union chief executive John O'Neill, who said yesterday on his return home that two "very poor" World Cup semi-finals and a tryless decider demonstrated an urgent need for a rethink on the sport. "Rugby league went from unlimited tackles to limited tackles; it went from three metres to five metres and reduced the value of a field goal to one," O'Neill said. "When you say, 'why did it do that', it did it for some pretty obvious reasons and we may be confronted with the same reasons. Rugby league has been around as a professional game for 100 years, I think there's a lot we can learn from some of their law changes. We need to create space, we need to create time, we want to create a philosophy that encourages try-scoring, that's what people come to see. We had two very poor (World Cup) semi-finals and we had a final in which there were no tries scored, that will not bring the crowds back."


 * With the first round of Super 14 action fumbling to a close at the weekend, the daggers were hauled out to slice up the new Experimental Law Variations (ELVs), which were supposedly introduced to speed up and simplify the game.


 * Wallaby and Waratahs winger Lote Tuqiri has labelled as "short-sighted" remarks by Springboks flyer Bryan Habana that the new laws on trial in the Super 14 are making rugby union become more like rugby league. Tuqiri, who played his first game under experimental law variations [ELVs] in the Waratah's 20-3 Super 14 round one win over the Hurricanes in Sydney last Saturday, believes union will prosper by being faster and less stop-start. He also applauds the way the game under the ELVs requires players to be better all-round athletes than before. Tuqiri's comments come after Habana, the Bulls winger, criticised the laws for taking away the many breaks in the game, rather than welcoming them, reports Rugby Heaven website. "I don't know what he is frustrated about. He [should] like the fast pace of it, the fact he is a speed merchant," said Tuqiri, who flies to New Zealand with the Waratahs tomorrow to play the Chiefs in Hamilton on Saturday. Habana said on Sunday that rugby union has "a lot more rugby league feel on it" under the news laws that are an International Rugby Board initiative. He is also worried that, with the new laws, there is "no stop-start" in the game. "If guys wanted to play rugby league, they'd go out and play rugby league," Habana said.


 * He's obviously in the process of learning the differences in rugby union and rugby league," he said. "Bit by bit he'll pick them up. Rugby league is perhaps more aggressive than union..." - Mourad Boudjellal
 * Opening try scorer Auelua said of the shoulder charge: "That's the Sonny special. He's got to learn to wrap his arms around. I guess if the rugby league boys saw it they'd probably think the rugby union boys are a bit soft, but that's the rules."


 * Rugby union's World Cup fares little better than its league counterpart, although the talent pool is spread wider and by the time it reaches its final eight upsets can and do occur. So here's a thought. This centenary actually marks the anniversary when league and union in this country divorced one another over money squabbles, following the earlier lead established by their English cousins. Is it time for a reconciliation? Why shouldn't union and league climb back into bed together, put aside the big issue that first split them and is now completely irrelevant, and produce a rugby code that could certainly lay claim to being a truly worldwide sport? At the centre of the big split was class war and the right for players, injured during matches and unable to go to work the following week, to be compensated. Of course, it was the working class that suffered more than the ruling classes. And so league was born. And for a long time it exacted revenge, wreaking havoc on union's playing stocks. But once true professionalism arrived for rugby union - and a revitalised rule book that has partially opened up the game - league has resembled a humbled schoolyard bully who suddenly discovers a new thug on the block.
 * At their worst, union is still a game too difficult to follow, a sport contorted by arcane rules understood only by physics professors. League is sometimes far too predictable - a march up the field, a succession of body clashes before a quick offloading of the ball.


 * The two-referee system, which many believe has helped the game become faster and more entertaining, could explain the continued interest in league. The unflattering style adopted by union could be a reason the Super 14 has waned.


 * ...league has a following in Australia that dwarfs union's.


 * Sailor said he would rather watch the NRL's wooden spoon battle as opposed to a Bledisloe Cup match. "I think rugby league is resilient; it's the people's game," Sailor said. "I don't miss rugby [union]. They need to do something. I think everyone realises that," Sailor added. "Even the Bledisloe Cup - it's usually a pretty big game on the calendar and I found it hard to watch. As a game I'd rather watch the Roosters play Cronulla. It (rugby union) is not as entertaining."


 * Union hasn't chewed up rugby league. Far from it, in fact. While the NRL has started its season in a blaze of glory, rugby union is drowning in a sea of monotony. A code in crisis only two years ago, is crowing. Nowhere is the disparity more evident than in the respective codes' broadcasting prospects. The NRL's existing television deal runs for a further two years, yet all three commercial stations have expressed an interest in bidding for the rights when they become available. A billion-dollar pay-day awaits. Rugby union is struggling to attract interest from any of the commercial networks. The pendulum has swung and the shift in fortunes will be exemplified at the Sydney Football Stadium tonight when Wests Tigers play Parramatta. On one side will be Lote Tuqiri, on the other Timana Tahu. Two shining symbols of union's relentless march towards supremacy have returned to the NRL. "Our game on the field is the key to our surge in popularity, and players have recognised that it's exciting to be part of rugby league," NRL chief executive David Gallop said. South Sydney chief executive Shane Richardson is even more bullish. "I wasn't worried because for 108 years administrators have managed to stuff up our game but it's survived for one reason and one reason only - it's better," Richardson said. "Every time we get ourselves in the shit the game gets us out of it. There's a reason - because it's better. And it's going to get even better." Former Canterbury and Melbourne coach Chris Anderson was among those to raise concerns over league's future. Yet Anderson, who has also coached the rival code in Wales, believes rugby union missed its opportunity, partly through its own inadequacies and partly because of league's capacity to captivate. "I think union had their opportunity and they probably blew it in a way. I think they lost their way on the field with where their game was," Anderson said. "The hard thing for them is it's hard to change their game because when you change it you get closer to league. Philosophically they're opposed to it. Their game just doesn't throw up the athlete, the superstar. They don't stand out like they do in rugby league. It's a simple game. It allows the athlete to be the star of the game."


 * The tackles were ferocious and at one stage there were some fisticuffs and we were down to fourteen a side. The game opened up a little. Almost rugby league and I wondered to myself: would rugby league lads handle this or are they tougher? Whose game is better? Confession time here: I love rugby league. I watch their tackle technique, the way they drill their forearm into the face of the tackled player when he is on the ground, and their running lines. I don't mind the shambolic scrums because their game is a passing and handling feast. The bravery taking the ball into contact at full speed is admirable, and their ability to spot an overlap shows a vision that not many union players possess. League, of course, arose because working men needed paid to take time off their jobs to play rugby on a Saturday. In an attempt to attract a crowd to pay them they did away with what they thought of as rugby's boring bits - lineouts and real scrums - made more space by taking two men off the pitch, and vowed to provide more entertainment. And I think it works. I hate union's snobby view of the 13-man game. But can you call one game better than the other? For instance does it mean anything that more countries have adopted rugby union or is that a quirk of its slightly more public school background? League's hotbeds are the North of England, the cities of Australia and New Zealand, and some large swathes of Papua New Guinea. Is union, with its greater number of facets and shapes and sizes a better game almost exclusively because of that? Is the tactical element of rugby union with its lineouts and scrums and kicks for territory more appealing? Or is it better to watch constant movement and a game where catching, passing, and tackling are the key skills? I went to Wigan v Bath at Twickenham in 1996, but it wasn't a fair contest. Wigan had Henry Paul, Martin Offiah, Andy Farrell, Jason Robinson and Shaun Edwards, but Bath had scrums and rolling mauls.


 * Leading rugby identities have labelled the sport "boring", as pressure mounts on Australian Rugby Union boss John O'Neill to revive the code. The critiques from former Wallaby Glen Ella and one-time Test coach Eddie Jones were delivered as former ARU boss Gary Flowers issued a letter via a legal representative putting O'Neill on notice after a magazine interview last month with the ARU chief. O'Neill was interviewed as part of a probe into the state of Australian rugby and the hurdles the code faces to claw its way back in a market dominated by the NRL and AFL.


 * I see a rugby league player playing rugby union. All the characteristics in Ashton's game are rugby league-based. That is why it is proving so difficult for opposing teams to cancel him out. He is running lines that are not usually run in union.
 * In the next few years, rugby union wingers will be emulating what Ashton is doing. They will cotton on and start to copy him. And defences will have to change their strategy to nullify it.
 * He is rewriting the way things will be done in rugby union for years to come.


 * The big hits and hunger to get off the ground and tackle were as in-your-face as league. Yet whereas that is the essence of league defence, there is a more intrinsic element to union that is harder to understand.
 * ...slow rugby is ugly rugby.
 * It has to be the league influence. In South Africa, union rules rugby's roost... There is no alternative, either for watching or comparing and contrasting the entertainment level, whereas in Sydney the Waratahs are battling with 14 opponents and another sport that thrives on the sexiness of its simplicity.


 * Although both codes are now professional, they remain different entities. League is a more fluid, open game, having reduced teams from 15 to 13...


 * "He's a megastar in the NRL which is the toughest league in the world in any code... We don't want to change Sam Burgess. We will change our game plan to suit him. We'd be crazy not to." - Mike Ford


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Beleive me when I say I could go on.