I blame a huge amount of our current crisis on the demise of country rugby league; of no more football 'in the bush.'

In 'the good old days' we had a Country Rugby League that had eight divisions: Newcastle, Riverina, Illawarra, Canberra and so on.

From these eight divisions there would be a knock-out competition for thirty spots whereby you could be picked to go to Sydney and play against, literally, the thirty best players in the world.

As a country footballer you had the opportunity to run out onto the Sydney Cricket Ground and play against titans, the likes of Raper and Langlands, the people that you'd read about.

And then, from those games, we actually had players from Country Seconds that were chosen to play for NSW.

Country players, Newcastle players, were picked to represent Australia.

That is all gone.

We've now had this absurd situation where Newcastle, which used to be regarded as the second strongest competition in the world (after Sydney), is not even a member of the Country Rugby League!

You could play for the Morpeth Bulls and play for Country, but if you're playing for the Western Suburbs Rosellas you're ineligible.

Ridiculous.

And now you can't play for Country if you're over 23 years of age!

Beyond ridiculous.

These new administrators talk about 'grass roots.' There's no bloody grass roots! No-one's playing in the bush.

Those few who are playing switch between clubs at the drop of a hat. There's no loyalty and no real local competition.

Our development is often compared to that of the Americans, but the comparison is extremely dubious.

The Yanks have a structure with a huge focus on inter-collegiate competition, which in many ways can be as big as the pro game.

Football, basketball, baseball - intense inter-school competitions. We had that. Not on the same scale, of course, but that was how we used to go about things. School sport.

You want to develop the grass roots? How about putting a few million dollars into the University Shield and then watching high schools suddenly sprout rugby league teams.

The real culprit though - the end of the golden era - was pay TV.

And, again, in the 80s, we tried to copy America but we overlooked one very important aspect. In America you could live in, say, San Francisco, and support the 49ers. Candlestick Park held 48,000 people amongst a population well into the millions. Pay TV was for people who couldn't fit into the park! In Australia we pay so we can watch it at home. It's not the same.

Really, if you're serious about looking after the sport, you should only be able to broadcast it once the ground is sold out. Simple.

We used to have a local Newcastle competition with regular attendances of over 20,000. Now? If you said there were 5000 at last year's grand final I'd suggest you were counting legs rather than heads.

In the meantime the AFL is coming for us at a hundred miles an hour.

And then there's the absurdity of modern player wages.

I remember the thrill of being picked to play for Country Seconds in Sydney in 1968. I was paid $60 for the week. I had to take the week off work, missed a club game (at $40 a win) and was given a second class return rail ticket from Maitland to Central. We played in front of nearly 40,000 people.

And the thing is - I would've paid the League to do it! If it came down to it I really would've paid them! To run out onto the Sydney Cricket Ground?! That was the best thing that could possibly happen to you. Any of us would've paid. It was such an honour, and that was why we did it.

With no games happening everybody's delving into the past compiling all the usual 'best ever' lists.

There's one that irks me a bit: Cameron Smith as the 'best ever hooker.' I will happily support the idea of Cameron Smith being one of the greatest players ever to have played the game, but best hooker? No. Hookers used to be a breed unto themselves. They had to actually win scrums. There was an art to it. How would Smith go against the likes of Noel Kelly? The answer is, not very well. Scrums aren't what they used to be.

And then there's the endless discussions about the 'greatest all-time half-back' with all the usual deserving contenders - but with what is, to me, one notable exception. It's fun, but sort of silly, to make a lot of these comparisons because the game has changed so much through the eras, the positional role has changed, and they always leave out the likes of Keith Holman, Kevin Junee and Barry Muir. Having said that I'm going to buy into it anyway and say that the half-back most often overlooked in these lists, who I reckon would have thrived in any era is Tommy Raudonikis. Why? He had the trifecta: mad, tough and talented.