NRL 2009

[jim]

Oct 2, 2009 23:54:04 GMT 10 Ryan N said:

Oct 2, 2009 10:41:44 GMT 10 sportsmad said:

I love the country but as a guy in his early twenties I don’t want to move there at my age. Maybe retire there. I don’t know anyone my age that would move to the country and nrl players are no exception. Inglis may have grown up in the bush but now that hes a hugely successful nrl player I doubt he’d want to leave the metropolis to go back to kempsey. hed probably get bored. I don’t think a player like jaryd hayne would want to leave the city with all its resources for a quiet life in the country when he can earn a $2m pay package staying in Sydney.

I'm young, and I'd never move to the city? I think you forget that people from the country play in the NRL. 2 million dollars in the country is better than 2 million in the city. I just think it's a narrowminded view and metropolitan society has shaped you that way. Anyone with any sort of intelligence knows living in the country is better once they actually move there. The only reason they don't always stay there is because there is more work in the city. Tamworth would only be good stories if there was a team located there. No big scandals or anything of the likes. But I think this is just an agree to disagree case because there's no persuading the city folk.

Sorry to say but you're part of a minority then, all the people I know that once lived in the country have all moved into the city over the last few years, not many around the late teens, early 20's want to stay in the bush when there's a big city lifestyle on offer. Yes, some may stay, but most won't.

[supersteve]

I think its fair to say its definately the vast minority of people in their 20's at least would actually choose to move to the country.

Its not really fair to assume Tamworth would only be good stories, just because its a country town doesnt mean anything really. It'd depend on the players they'd recruit. Not all big cities produce idiots. The gold coast is one of, if not the biggest party town in Australia and to date they havent had a single issue.

[Druzik]

Predictions for today anyone?

I am going storm 24-18 Parra.

[Ryan N]

I never said at the expense of a Queensland team, as I couldn't comment on Queensland or Queenslanders. I can imagine it's better than Sydney as is Melbourne.

Gold Coast is again not Sydney. Remember the NRL is saturated with Sydney teams. So I'm using them as a comparison.

I don't think that's a fair assumption actually. Because myself I know of many cases of people coming back from the city and never wanting to live there again. So we have different examples. The only reason which I will repeat that most people I know move to the city is due to work reasons.

Anyway this argument's stupid because Tamworth would never be considered I was just pointing out merits, which there are plenty. Give me a reason why Central Queensland can work if Tamworth won't for these reasons?

[supersteve]

Im going Storm 20-12

[jim]

Oct 4, 2009 19:05:30 GMT 10 Ryan N said:

Anyway this argument's stupid because Tamworth would never be considered I was just pointing out merits, which there are plenty. Give me a reason why Central Queensland can work if Tamworth won't for these reasons?

Strong Industrial backing, a larger population base. Just a couple but I don't think CQ will be a realistic chance until atleast 2017 or whenever the next teams are put in.

[jim]

Oct 4, 2009 10:39:20 GMT 10 Druzik said:

Predictions for today anyone?

I am going storm 24-18 Parra.

Close, I was tipping Storm 30-18.

[sportsmad]

a final comment on channel 9 news tonight; the game attracted more than 1.2 million sydney viewers and just over 1 million melbourne viewers. if anyone comes across other ratings stats , i.e the final result......

[jim]

Oct 5, 2009 18:29:44 GMT 10 sportsmad said:

a final comment on channel 9 news tonight; the game attracted more than 1.2 million sydney viewers and just over 1 million melbourne viewers. if anyone comes across other ratings stats , i.e the final result......

Those are amazing numbers for Melbourne, I can really see their crowds and interest in the city flourishing with the new stadium next year.

[Ryan N]

Actually 600, 000 Melbourne viewers sorry.

[sportsmad]

yeah your right ryan , sorry. never trust channel 9. im not sure what figure they were going on. anyway , revised published total is below. however , there is a lot more regional veiwers in nsw and QLD than there is in other states. apparantly the regional numbers arent available straight away like the 5 city ones so will be very close once all totals are in IMO.

NRL got 2.41 Million viewers.
Sydney : 1,119,000
Melbourne: 650,000
Brisbane: 535,000
Adelaide: 47,000
Perth: 65,000

AFL got 2.70 Million viewers
Sydney: 309,000
Melbourne: 1,426,000
Brisbane: 254,000
Adelaide: 403,000
Perth: 312,000

[sportsmad]

More people watched NRL grand final on television than watched AFL grand final

THIS is the story every league fan living south of the border should cut out, fold up and pop in the wallet for the next visit down the pub: The NRL Grand Final was more popular on TV than the AFL Grand Final.

In figures that will have Andrew Demetriou choking on his next footy frank, the NRL blockbuster on Sunday outrated the AFL equivalent two weeks ago by more than 200,000 footy fans across Australia.

The combined national and regional TV audience figures for the Geelong Cats v St Kilda Grand Final, spruiked at the time by the code's boss Demetriou as a benchmark, averaged 3.4 million.

But the league finale went better, attracting an average 3.6 million people across the country.

It is a staggering result for league and Channel 9, which won the ratings night, and defied the year's off-field dramas, which in June sidelined Nine's own Matthew Johns in the wake of the Cronulla group sex scandal.

While it's only taken four Grand Final appearances for two victories, Melbourne footy fans in particular appear to have finally seen the light on league, with the AFL stronghold thunderstruck by the Storm and Parramatta Eels decider.

Nine's coverage consolidated the code's footing south of the border, where the audience peaked at 925,000 viewers.

In a confidence-lifting victory for the game's administrators, the Melbourne market averaged 685,000 viewers, up from 492,000 last year.

The average five capital city audience of 2.42 million - up 342,000 nationally on 2008 - was the network's best ratings result in 2009.

An exuberant NRL chief executive David Gallop yesterday celebrated the results as "a huge show of public support for rugby league".

"Congratulations to Melbourne on winning two premierships in three years, to Parramatta for providing one of the greatest runs to a Grand Final and to all the fans who shared the experience," he said.

The growth in television ratings in 2009 "underlines the opportunities that lie ahead" for the competition, Gallop said.

It was a reasonably low-key welcome home for the Storm, with around 50 fans greeting them at Melbourne Airport yesterday ahead of the team's presentation to several hundred more at Princes Park.

More fans are expected for a civic reception today in Melbourne's Federation Square.

Skipper Cameron Smith raised the trophy and managed a reasonable impersonation of sports commentator Bruce McAvaney when asked how the celebrations had been following the Grand Final win.

"We had a couple of quiet beers with the boys and our families - just a couple ... and they were delicious," Smith said, attempting to mimic McAvaney's recent AFL commentary when he described a play from Hawks star Cyril Rioli as "delicious".

Centre Greg Inglis told the cheering crowd of his match-sealing field goal: "I just got the ball and kicked it, I snapped it low and flat and said 'please get over'."

"I've got a (premiership) ring. We've done a really good job."

The Storm had dual cause to celebrate after the club's under 20 side won the Toyota Cup grand final, with the team also presented to the crowd at the family day.

[sportsmad]

ive thought that michael searle was the best person in our game for a while but this article reiterated that:

A man's mission to unite NRL
MICHAEL Searle is sipping Earl Grey tea as he gazes through square-rimmed designer glasses across Sydney Harbour and beyond.

We're sitting in the executive club suite of the Sheraton on the Park. Here, 21 floors up, horns blasting from CBD traffic snarls are reduced to a faraway murmur.

It's an image at odds with the burly forward who carted the pill up for Gold Coast during their first NRL incarnation in the late 1980s.

It's also at odds with the no-nonsense chief executive who butted heads with David Gallop until he got his way in 2005, realising a six-year dream to get the Coast back into the comp. And it's certainly at odds with the man charged with perhaps the toughest diplomatic mission since Cain and Abel parted ways - unifying rugby league under one, truly independent governing body.

But, as the front-rower said to the actress, looks can be deceiving.

Beneath the serene exterior purrs an engine that would rival any of

the V8s zooming round Mt Panorama this weekend.

How else could Michael Searle command a thriving accountancy firm, head an international talent management group that boasts some of the world's top surfers, run an

NRL franchise and be responsible for setting up the Indigenous-All Stars game next year? Oh, and there's that small matter of brokering a commission to take over the running of the game.

He may not just be the hardest worker in rugby league, Michael Searle could be the hardest working man in Australia. "I'm an 18-hour-a-day guy," he admits. "But I don't have any difficulty bouncing out of bed on a Monday. I really am living the dream. I was raised a Catholic but if I believed in reincarnation, I'd say

I must have had a really, really crappy life last time around because I've been blessed this time."

Searle can be found at his desk at Titans Marine Parade headquarters in Southport from 5am. The other night he text messaged a colleague at 11.41pm. He is Mr Perpetual Motion of rugby league administration.

Yet today he estimates eight of every 10 waking minutes is spent working on the proposed independent commission.

It's an obsession borne out of not just a love for the game, but a profound knowledge of where he'd be without it. "I owe everything to rugby league," he says. "It gave my grandfather an opportunity after the second world war, it gave my father a career and our family an existence on the Gold Coast that we would never have had if it wasn't for rugby league.

"The only reason that my dad moved from Tamworth and my mum from Werris Creek to the Gold Coast was because that's where he played his football. It's given me an opportunity to get a degree and it's given my children a life they would never have expected.

"So I will dedicate my life to the game for no other reason than the game has been good to me."

From the viewpoint of a boy who grew up in the fast-buck days of the Surfers Paradise white-shoe brigade - those shady property developers that cast a pall over the strip for decades - the game has also been good to his community. "Getting the Titans into the NRL has just unified the city behind a cause," he explains.

"The Gold Coast has always been accused of being soulless. But now it seems to have almost created a level of passion among the kids and that's all anyone cares about. When I was a kid you were almost looked down upon being from the Gold Coast.

"You were almost second class. Now the kids are proud of their city - there's a sense of ownership and community." But one community's league love affair is not enough for Searle. His mission knows no geographic bounds.

He may have been raised a Catholic, but he is spreading the good word of the league with the evangelistic zeal of a missionary man.

Which might just explain how the notion of an independent commission taking over the game from those uneasy bed partners, the Australian Rugby League and News Limited, publisher of The Daily Telegraph, went from dead in the water to an imminent possibility in the space of 17 months.

It was Searle who, in May 2008, assembled fellow NRL CEOs Bruno Cullen (Broncos), Denis Fitzgerald (formerly Eels), Shane Richardson (Rabbitohs), Brian Waldren (Storm), Steve Burraston (Knights) and Tony Zappia (formerly Sharks) for the first meeting to discuss a unified force for league. Fittingly, they met at the game's spiritual home, the SCG.

It was a delicate summit. Two of those present (Waldren and Cullen) ran clubs owned by News Limited so any talk of shifting ownership of the game away from its 50 per cent partners was avoided.

"Any discussions around the shifting of equity was never openly discussed in a group format because

it would have made everyone uncomfortable," Searle recalls.

"So the equity being shifted to a non-profit entity probably came out of a sub-unit of that because the original concept was about restructuring the branding, and the equity shift came out of what we would be aiming for if we were

to move forward for the next

100 years."

That first meeting went all day and into the night. There have been 15 in Sydney since and one on the Gold Coast. They last for three to six hours.

Searle has gathered powerful allies, including Harvey Norman's Katie Page, former Qantas chairman Gary Pemberton and Sydney Roosters chairman Nick Politis.

Politis, one of league's true powerbrokers, helped ensure crucial figures such as Nine Network chief executive David Gyngell got on board. But Searle is adamant a far more potent force has driven the mood for change: the fans.

"Everywhere I go people ask me, 'When are we going to get it?' It's one of the few things I have seen come up in the game where it hasn't been howled down.

"I think people see there is a real benefit to this new structure and everyone wants to see the game

do better."

NRL's well documented off-field troubles this year have only galvanised the mood for reform, says Searle. "I think what (the off-field scandals) did was solidify a lot of fans who said, 'You know, this is part of my fabric ... I did grow up in a rugby league suburb, town or city, I love the game'. I had a discussion with Wayne Bennett the other day. He said, 'I always knew how much Queenslanders love their league, but I never realised the passion down here, they really love it in Sydney'.

"Often when things are bleak and you have dark days, people sit up and say, 'I'd hate to see my game die'.

"You almost have to lose something before you appreciate how valuable it is to you."

Searle has felt that, like when David Gallop rang him on August 16, 2004, to tell him the NRL was rejecting the Gold Coast's reinclusion proposal, that the money would instead be spent on junior development officers.

Searle told the game's chief, "That's fine Dave, that's your choice, but you can stick your development officer and your witch's hat right up your arse."

Nine months later, the Gold Coast were back in the NRL. "When I'm passionate about something, I go hard for it," he says. "I think I've had to substitute hard work because I'm not the most intellectual person in the world - hard work has been the only way I got anywhere."

That work appears ready to deliver Searle his most significant payoff yet: the game he loves being truly unified.

[HKR AWAY DAYS]

Fui Fui is touted as a potential signing for a SL club in as the rumourmill goes into overdrive. Just wondering if there is any news down under? Cheers.

[sportsmad]

from the herald:

Fuifui open to Eels unless better deal comes along
October 25, 2009

THE most popular man in the NRL has declared he's still on the market for a new contract - and Kiwis prop Fuifui Moimoi's revelation is sure to attract interest from clubs in both hemispheres.

Moimoi, discounting rumours he had been directly approached by English club Warrington, said he was ready to begin negotiating with the Eels over a deal to replace the one that expires in 2010. But he has warned the club he is open to other offers and will take the best deal.

Eels chairman Roy Spagnolo was Moimoi's agent but to avoid a conflict of interest, Moimoi has changed representatives to Isaac Moses, who has opened talks with Parramatta.

Moimoi said he knew nothing of the Warrington bid but added: ''If the club wants me to stay, I will stay at the club but I also have to do what's best for me and my family. At the moment, I think it's only talk.

''I am happy with the club, but whatever comes up, I will have to look after my family and I will take that.''

Moimoi hinted he would seriously consider any strong English offers for 2011, especially given the Eels' salary cap issues. ''I think Haynesy [Jarryd Hayne] has taken all the money, so it will be hard,'' he laughed.