Would be great to get something over here, having championship clubs involved possibly even a mixture of League and union clubs too

Would have been great to have given the SL winners an invitational place to use as a warm-up to the WCC. The 9s schedule was sorted well before it was announced the WCC was going to be in Oz though unfortunately.

Didn't we have the Carnegie floodlit 9's a season or 2 ago?

Timing would have to change for it to appeal to SL clubs. They're not going to release their top players for a friendly tournament once the season has already started

There will be nothing "friendly" about the Auckland Nines.



Perhaps there will have to be adjustments of schedule to allow the tournament to be played just before the Super League season starts.

Was hardly as high profile as the Auckland 9's....

1. The organisers have made no bones about presenting this as an alternative to the Wellington 7's. Expect "sold out" signs erected but swathes of empty seats due to 38,000 of the 44,000 attendance being at the bar dressed as super friggin Mario brothers or the Von Trapp family!

2. Holidays here are 30 days + over Christmas. Imagine if you in France/America...(shall we call it Canada?) had your summer holidays and Xmas all at once! People leave work about the 20th of December and are not back until Feb......nobody will be interested in rushing back from the "bach" in mid January to watch Gareth Hock take someones head off.....

No, I disagree.

No. The Magic weekend should be replaced by a 9's tournament over two days to take it out of the regular season and give us a different spectacle to watch.



Thoughts:

1) Regular randomly drawn knockout competition

2) Mini-league, one or two games per team (40mins per game) with highest points winer.

3) Rules to entourage fringe players to get a game

4) And why not, winner of the comp to play the antipodean winners at a later date. Who wouldn't mind a good game around the Christmas period for example? It's not like Boxing day is the same anymore.

I was going to ask why don't the poms just do their own version, with SL and Championship clubs in it somewhere in the UK (Wembley 9's or something) but I like this better.

This is to promote the NRL, do you think they give a about uk clubs on this?

I doubt they do care, it's my main gripe with Australia, they have so much power to change this sport for the better and they simply couldn't give a fk, maintaining the status quo keeps them as the top team/league and I think that's how they want to keep it.