Brian McDermott

I remember Penrith came over.

I'm not going to get the numbers right, but I'll give it a stab.

Penrith came over when I was Leeds assistant coach in 2004.

And they came over and played our 18s.

I think we went really well against them back then, Leeds Rhinos 18s.

Anyway, our head of youth is talking to their head of youth and they're swapping stories.

And again, I'm not going to get this accurate, but something like we had 250 kids aligned to our club, whatever that means.

Okay, they had something like 4,000.

And this is 2004.

Queensland's a bit different.

The second grade and the third grade's a little bit different in Queensland.

But in New South Wales, as you know, you've got Andrew Jones, Laurie Daly, Harold Matthews, SG Ball, Josie Flegg, New South Wales Cup, NRL.

And every one of those teams play a very rigid, very structured, very well coached system of attacking and defending.

So you promote yourself and you go up in grades and all the players know how to play.

They all understand the nuances about keep go defence and keep go attack and Super League players do for sure.

But you go ask a young 15 year old kid in Super League, the exposure to the sport,

And the other thing is the exposure to the sport.

Look at the pundits on TV.

You know, you've got yourself and you've got, you know, Joey Johns is on there with Brad Fittler and Cooper Cronk's on there with Luke Keery now.

And just these blokes who have played at the highest level that turn around and go on TV and yourself is giving opinion.