On Saturday night my brother was suffering quietly - well, no, very noisily in fact - through the Waratahs' Super 14 match against the Sharks at the Sydney Football Stadium. After a while, the man in front of him turned around and said: ‘I'm the one you should be feeling sorry for, mate. I've got a season ticket.'

It's nothing new to point out how tedious high-level rugby has become. Kick, ruck, scrum. Scrum re-set. Scrum re-set. Injury. Kick, kick, line-out. Oh, let's go back and re-set that scrum again. Injury. Whistle: what, full-time already?

And that's just Super 14, the showbiz version, loosened up by ‘experimental' rules and unencumbered by the fear that so paralyses the international game that rugby, real rugby, when it breaks out, grips the imagination only because it interrupts the torpor as an alarm clock breaks sleep.

Disgruntlement with rugby, which southern hemisphere administrators do at least recognise, is reflected in falling TV and live audiences. In acknowledging the need to ‘enhance the product', administrators are rightly bearing in mind those remaining spectators. They don't know what to do, but know they have to do something.

But this is to sideline rugby's other constituency, the players.

To differentiate the two rugby codes, the saying used to be that the professional game, league, was primarily played for audiences, while the amateur game, union, was for the players.

In 2010, what player in his right mind could possibly prefer the game of union?

This week, Lote Tuqiri will return to rugby league, playing for the Wests Tigers, after eight years in the gilded cage of rugby union. He had a nice life, for a while: $2 million a year, lots of travel, light workload, nice gold jersey. Then the fringe benefits got the better of him, and his Wallabies contract was torn up. He went to play union in grim Leicester until finally the penny dropped. No amount of money validated letting his sport-playing life go to waste in this way. It wasn't the cold or the rain so much as the sheer monotony of getting himself through another game.

As an outside back, Tuqiri is at his best running with the ball, passing, taking passes, slicing through gaps, evading tacklers, scoring tries. He could be seen doing these things for several years with the Brisbane Broncos, Queensland and Australia. Then he went to union. There he learnt cosmopolitan ways and did a lot of chasing other people's kicks. Because in union, that's what an outside back does. He chases kicks, he tackles, he kicks the ball himself. He catches a kick. He kicks it back. Every so often he gets a flash of opportunity to run in broken field. But only two or three times on a good day.

Tuqiri is joining a reflux of league players who dabbled with union for the travel and the easy money, then got back to a game which is, while more physically demanding and geographically confined, infinitely more enjoyable for someone who actually likes playing football. Mat Rogers and Wendell Sailor ended up back in league. You can bet the former Bronco Berrick Barnes will be back, once he gets the travel bug out of his system. He told me in a recent interview: ‘If I wanted to watch a game for the spectacle, it wouldn't be the one I'm playing.' Barnes, perhaps this country's most gifted all-round sportsman since Victor Richardson, is shrivelling in the barren badlands of union. He deserves better. Mark Gasnier, Sonny Bill Williams - these guys are playing union for the money and a European lifestyle. They might represent their countries. But they're young men, and once they get back to playing for the sport itself, they'll return to league.

In any one rugby league game on any given weekend, you will see half a dozen try-scoring movements that you won't see in a season of union. It's just a better game. It lacks the grandeur of a union Test at Twickenham or Murrayfield, it lacks the upper-middle-class trappings - but it's a better game. That's why it's killing union in the ratings and attendances. It's more fun to play and more fun to watch. It's fast, it doesn't stop, the skills are breathtaking, and the object is to score tries. Sounds like a good idea for a game. Welcome back, Lote, to a place where you can entertain and be entertained.