1. Quite the opposite. Say it to yourself again "Championship Clubs do not produce players the amateur game does"
Therefore Championship clubs are not important to player production. The amateur game is.
Nor are they contributing to attracting paying fans beyond the average of 1,000 a club they do get through the gates.
2, Simplistic and totally inaccurate. You can't put people in boxes and you can't say people will be made to like soccer.
If they live in Leigh, Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale and they want to follow RL they can and do go to Wigan
If they live in Shipley, Baildon, Leeds, Batley, Dewsbury or wherever and they want to follow RL they can and do go to Bradford
If they live in Wetherby, Harrogate, Barnsley, Dewsbury, Hunslet, or York they can and do go to Leeds
If they live in Blackpool, Halifax, Wakefield, Leeds, or Bradford they can and do go to Hunslet....
If they live anywhere but Castleford they can and do go to castleford as Cas Vegas outlined on this board when he discussed all the people he knew that supported Castleford.
3. We are ALREADY marginalised. Get a map of Britain and felt tip pen any county (split Yorkshire into ridings) and colour in the places where more than 3,000 people pay to watch RL.
You will get three places only.
We're doing fantastically well for a game that is marginalised at pro level.
3. Your statement is a nonsense and makes no commercial or sporting sense. Here's the facts to chew on......
a. People are attracted to sport by the sports being played at a high level. People go on tennis courts because Andy Murray wins at Wimbledon, Because they want to be Bradley Wiggins, because they want to be Wayne Rooney, because they want to be Sam Tomkins. They want to watch the best as well.
Rugby League needs a strong superleague.
b. Rugby league needs semi pro clubs in places that have a market for it isolated because of distances to SL clubs so we need our clubs in West Cumbria, Barrow, North London, Gloucester, Hemel, Coventry, Gateshead, South Wales etc.
If we ever had the money to subsidise clubs these would be the ones we must give the money to so one day they may become SL clubs if the games fortunes ever changed dramatically.
c. Regardless of your assertions the figures stack up.
Since RL has concentrated the money on an elite number of big clubs attendances have risen 50%
You plans to reverse this would ruin the game......
1. That s what I did say. You are getting confused. I also said SL don t produce players either, amateur clubs do.The fact that neither produce players is therefore not an argument pro or con the small clubs whose existence you asked me to justify. There needs to be no rebuttal of this point as it is not even relevant to the discussion in the first place. Have you got that now ?.
2. That s your considered opinion, dogmatically proferred that my point is simplistic. I disagree. Nature abhors a vacuum. If you create a RL vacuum by killing off small clubs, the youth of the area will gravitate to another sport, probably soccer, if not then they will find other interests but that will not be RL.I agree they cannot be made to like anything but they will attach themselves voluntarily to new sports or interests in the absence of RL. Your long meandering litany of towns and places likely to provide catchment areas to distant SL teams is simplistic and only supported by a few anecdotal posts from other forum members and your own wildly innacurate and now discredited assertion that 200 fans would travel from Oldham to Salford if there were no senior club in the town.
It is my contention that a vibrant, successful local club would attract many more fans to the game from their area than if they were left to travel to rival towns with a SL club in it in the absence of a local club.
3.I get six areas East Yorks, West Yorks, greater Manchester, Cheshire, Merseyside and Greater London but, no matter, yes the game is marginalised. If the smaller teams all die, it will be more than marginalised it will be minimalised.
3 a from your post.
You are talking rubbish. people play sport because they like the sport and want to enjoy playing it, be it tennis, rugby or tiddlewinks. No young child takes up sport because he wants to be Andy Murray or Wayne Rooney or Sam Tomkins for that matter except for a small few like yourself who are besotted with adoration of the top strata and think that nothing else has any right or purpose for existence.
3b from your post.
It needs these distant clubs and also the not so distant clubs to provide a focal point of the game for the people. Some neighbouring colossus with no affinity to the area is not that necessary focal point.
It also needs some of these clubs both local to the heartlands and from farther afield to be given the opportunity to get to SL when and if they get the famous turnover numbers for the spread and advancement of the game but the power elite don t want that. They want to contract until we only need the stub of your famous crayon to colour in the whole geographical footprint of the game.
3c
Firstly, the game needs a strong SL, you assert that I don t want that, but you are wrong.
The increased numbers you speak of are not new. We have had these kinds of numbers before. The game, including the SL elite, had fallen to such a low ebb that the only way for the numbers to go was up and these increases were brought about by the injection of Sky money, which gave the game the impetus to regain past glories.
The tradgedy of it was that the greed at the top ring fenced all the money for themselves otherwise we might have a bigger better league than we have.
What are my plans to reverse? To reverse what ? I have only suggested a withdrawal from the insane levels of spending which are sending much of the SL into debt and bankruptcy. Anyway, they are not my plans. Who am I, some commissar, some great controllor with a magic wand? you flatter me, Sir.
