SOMETIMES rugby league fans, and I include myself in this, are the biggest masters of pulling apart the game we love.

And let’s face it, there are currently plenty of areas on and off the field to moan about.

That said, if Sunday Times rugby union correspondent Stephen Jones had written just a smidgen of the stuff fans now say about the 13-man code he would be hammered from all points of the M62 corridor.

The relationship between fans and the game is like Hilda Ogden’s used to be with Stan on Coronation Street.

Hilda may have spent years calling her hubby a “big, lazy lummox”, but it was a sign of affection really.

If we were not that bothered, we would just walk away and do something else instead.

The muttering of discontent about the state of the game is not a slight on the skilled athletes playing the game, but I rarely meet anyone who believes the spectacle is as entertaining as it was 20 years ago.

A combination of tactics and the apparent lack of high-calibre overseas stars are cited as reasons for people mulling over the veracity of the ‘greatest game’ slogan.

With regards to tactics, people want to have their cake and eat it.

So plenty want their team to flash the ball about like Daryl Powell’s Castleford, but still win the Super League like Wigan.

Every Castleford team I recall has always lived up to the monicker of Classy Cas on account of their style. Maybe it is partly due to them have a significantly shorter pitch than anyoner else, so they don't bother with yardage sets. All they ever do is attack.

Alas they have not won a major trophy for 30 years.

It would be benefit the game as an entertaining product if the rules rewarded open play, rather than a dour brand.

My daughter has only just learned chess - and when she plays against me she adopts a swashbuckling style; she has no interest in plodding pawns forward a square at a time and so three or four moves in and her dashing knights and blazing bishops are terrorising me. I'm no Victor Korchnoi, but all I do is steady, no risk plays to pick off her star pieces and still always beat her.

Sadly, it tends to be the same in rugby. The flashy teams tend to ultimately flounder when it comes to the big games.

The product we are seeing on the field, the battle for territory and the five drives and a kick is now pretty standard across the board. It is a culmination of coaches exploiting the rules to the nth degree to deliver the league points and cup wins, which of course make prizes.

At the end of the day people - fans, coaches, media and directors - look at the scoreboard, there is no one at the sideline holding up boards giving marks for artistic impression.

However, there are fans yearning for the ball to go through the hands at least a couple of times in each set.

At times last year Wigan’s style of attack was absolutely slaughtered by their own fans – but how many of those were complaining when that, on-paper pretty ordinary, side were running around Old Trafford with the big, ugly pot.

And for me, that is not satisfying for anyone.

For this argument, let’s leave out the impact of the salary cap in robbing the competition of flair NRL players that could light up even the dullest of evenings.

We have spent more than a century refining the rules of rugby league and changes that have been made, particularly in 1984 and during early spells of Super League, were supposed to make it more dynamic.

But when all those new rules are put together and played to, it has created a product that is on the whole duller and more predictable.

Players are now overly regimented and too timid to express themselves.

They know that the cardinal sin is turning the ball over, so the off load to create a second phase is curbed and you rarely see a winger ever trying to take his opposite number on the outside early on in the set. And no scrum half would ever chip and chase like Neil Holding used to do.

And likewise, the rotation of the big men has ensured that their role in every set is central from the first to last minute.

it is time to row back on some of those rules?

Is the game we have now created is the end result of allowing multiple interchanges of big men, the 10 metre rule, three men in the tackle and the denigration of the scrum?