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The women's series is becoming more competitive very quickly. New Zealand haven't lost yet this season, but Australia and Canada have run them close a few times in big matches. And then beneath those 3 the likes of France, England, USA and Russia have become competitive, if a little...

Yeah, but Match of the Day is a highlights show not live sport. Just pointing out how different it is to the situation here where the biggest games each weekend in the NRL and AFL are on FTA. Who knows, that might not always be the case.

Another big target market is the expat communities of all the participating teams.

I think popularity is more to do with historical factors. AFL has been on FTA in Sydney for ages and it has rarely got big audiences and it certainly hasn't got anywhere near the NRL. English Premier League is all on Pay TV in the UK and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

So the lesson is that we can demonstrate at a fairly high level the impact of small law changes - and if the consequences are mostly positive then that will increase the chances of there being changes at international level.

They should be contracting for cover anyway. Players can go down injured at any time after all. And guys involved in 7's will provide a lot more lead time than players getting injured. It doesn't seem an insurmountable obstacle to me. It would be nice to hear less complaining and more...

Shortsighted in my view. The Olympics is a huge opportunity for rugby as a sport and if the profile of rugby increases as a result then all will benefit from it. Having an Olympic medallist or two as part of your squad for example would be a cool thing - with promotional and sponsorship...

And yet for their normal home games they tend to get about 8000. They've done well to turn that match (at Wembley) into an event, but their actual supporter base is not large.

So what? Those teams would play in bigger stadiums if they had substantially greater demand. England has no shortage of stadiums of all capacities. A few of those teams have very small fan bases. The Aviva Premiership is not even close to the popularity of Super Rugby, so even if a couple of...

It's not a false statistic. Here's stats from the 2013/14 season(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_attendance_figures_at_domestic_professional_sports_leagues): Super Rugby 2013 125 games, Total Attendance: 2,547,978 Average: 20,384 Top 14 2013–14 182 games, Total Attendance...

But European rugby cannot be compared with the NBA and the Premier League. The difference in commercial value between the EPL and the A League, or the NBA and the NBL is ridiculously huge. The difference between European Rugby and Super Rugby - particularly on a per team basis is not so high...

One thing going for this first Sydney tournament will be the fact it's in the Olympic year. Surely that will mean there'll be some reasonably big names involved. Maybe even the likes of SBW and Folau.

I heard the Vegas event got saved at the last minute a few months ago. It will be paired with Vancouver and moved to March as far as I've read. It would be a bad decision to get rid of it IMO. The pitch there is a little narrow and the stadium is a bit of a drive from the strip, but it's...

While rugby is growing internationally, it's not like it's quickly becoming a major sport all over the place. It's really only a significant sport in about 10 nations and those are the same nations it's been a major sport in for decades. Taking over entrenched national sports in any country...

So it will be early 2016 rather than in October this year?

Excellent, I shall be there. Hope they create a theme and promote it early. That has worked really well for the London 7's in the past few years. Last year the theme was monsters and this year it's going to be galactic. This sort of stuff is fun and works really well to create a carnival like...

To me it seems quite likely that super rugby will evolve into something a bit closer to what hoggy is talking about anyway. Though probably closer to the NFL structure than the European rugby and soccer structure. I think that a 6th Australian Super Rugby team is fairly likely at some...

Every Aussie team will play 3 matches against South African opposition and 1 against either the Japanese or Argentinian team. It's not much different.

I think you guys who say you haven't noticed it much have just not taken it in. It's a bit like a clock ticking when you're trying to sleep or relax - you might not notice it for a while but then when you do you hear it all the time. It's used a lot. Just google "third tier" and ARU or Bill...

Crowds for Perth, Melbourne, QLD Country and Canberra were pretty comparable with the Sydney teams minus the Stars.