Shock horror! Ellery Hanley tells the truth

Finally, finally, finally, someone important in the upper echelons of our game has had the balls to come out and tell the truth about rugby league in England!

Below is my own personal rant about the whole situation and my comments on what Ellery has said earlier today. You can see exactly what Ellery Hanley had to say on England by clicking here.

For the last decade, the robots at the RFL have told us that everything is alright, that the 'game is growing' at 'greater rates than ever before'. They'll tell us that the game is always expanding, because they 'somehow' manged to tap into a fanatic community in the South of France, and because a few Super League games have been played in Wales and Newcastle and Paris in the past, before those ventures went very drastically, but all-too-predictably wrong, both sportingly and economically.

These robots plough pound upon pound into the afore mentioned ventures, blindly employing their faith in the same 1,000 people turning up to the gates week-in, week-out with no commercial campaigns supporting them, and only a little more supporting the entire professional game. And all this while they leave a century-old club like Bradford to rot in the very same administrative mistakes that they managed to overlook and overturn when it was their brainchild that was up a creek without paddle.

These robots - the tennis player and Mr. Creosote - tell us everything is going well with the game when they turn down major sponsorship money to bang a couple of players on the sides of a few lorries.

And recently - in 2010 in fact - the very same robots chose appoint an Englishman to tell us and show the rest of the world that English coaches do exist, and that they are very much a growing breed. Who they chose was, in fact, what I like to call a proxy. (Well, I like to call him much stronger things than 'proxy', but this is a family site.) This proxy had just led Bradford to a 9th-place finish, playing some spectacularly dull, unattractive rugby along the way - of course he was ideal for the job of guiding England to test success.

This proxy then goes out of his way to employ the expertise of the RAF and the Marines to toughen up his players because the full-time boss can't be bothered, or doesn't have it in him. He taps into the expertise of our rugby union cousins, on coaching tips and skill drills, because he is inept; pure and simple.

And he then goes out of his way to ignore the grassroots that the robots seem to be doing their best to forget about, to ignore the likes of Lomax, Ratchford, Myler, Robinson to get his hands on a Kiwi who has never been nor ever will be good enough to be a Kiwi. He tours Australia looking for any loose forward with a 3rd cousin born in Pontefract, or a centre with a left toe that has some sort of English gene pool heritage.

And before you know it, where are we? When we combine the two entities, what we come up with is what's commonly known as a disaster. We have a 14-team league with 4 teams (at least) who have no competitive business being in the league. The league is unsustainable; this has been my view from day one of this licensing nonsense coming into light, and is now coming into evidence with teams like Widnes, Wakefield, Castleford and London languishing oh so painfully towards the bottom of the league, and with Bradford and I daresay a few other as yet unnamed sides struggling financially to the extent of crippling extinction. Domestically, the game is suffocating.

What we also have is what Ellery Hanley is talking most specifically about - that is, essentially, a terrible national set-up. You may think 'terrible' is too strong a word to use here, despite the increased number of options we have now, which is undoubtedly the case, I do not and cannot deny this.

But who are these 'options'? We have a world class fullback who will not be moved for the next ten years (unless he moves to the other code).

We have plenty of wingers, but only two who I would say are very good wingers, and they are in the England side as we speak.

We have one centre - Jack Reed. Ryan Atkins is a fantastic Super League centre, but as Hanley says, it doesn't take a lot to look good in a competition "a million miles", as Hanley described it, behind what the NRL offers. I believe Phil Gould described him perfectly when he said "he can tackle, but he can't defend". And Carl Ablett on the other side?

We have a loose forward at stand-off who can kick goals. We have a Kiwi stand-off at scrum-half who has had his year in the spotlight. And while these two pair up for the Exiles game, a certain St Helens number seven runs out for the Knights against Ireland at the weekend. That makes sense...

We have two props who are out-of-form, in out-of-form sides for the Exiles test; one of whom still captains us, despite not even captaining his club.

We have a good back-row, I can't complain there, but only because that is the only area where we genuinely have a strong pool of talent.

We may well match, even beat the Exiles in this series with that side, but that will not move us closer to Australia, as the robots and their proxy will inevitably tell us - it will simply mean we've won two games.

You may say, 'there's the NRL lot to come back into that set-up, making it a good side', and I wouldn't disagree per se. But these players are exceptions, and these four or five men can't win us tests on their own. Resources are nothing if you don't have the expertise to exploit them, and we all-too-clearly do not have that expertise.

But in terms of excellence, that is exactly where they will be come 2013 - on their own. Because the league is not good enough, because we are not good enough, because this sport is not good enough anymore, I'm afraid.

Thank you, Mr. Hanley. The truth is refreshing.

Fan Article, Written By: Saint Until I Die

Photo credit: SWpix.com