bbfaz

It's OK. Thankless task moderating this thread.

My post about revisionism was actually about the Labour Party, specifically the New Labour era and the political positions of some of its prominent MPs. Why did it get moved?

How will this change anything? They'll just find a way for these people to play for Queensland like always.

So you're saying that rather than open things up, they should be closed down?

To post on the original subject, I liked the idea of opening up professionalism as put forward by Kris on page 1. One of the most disappointing things about the Championship 1 expansion from South Wales through to Coventry was that it didn't expand within the footprint or on the fringes of the footprint. No NCL sides, no Woolston Rovers in Chester. However, if there's no promotion or relegation we fall into a situation where you're too small to succeed. You can't chase the dream, there's no dream to chase or, more appropriately, no dream to sell. Once you start playing professionally, a lot of the focus shifts from keeping all the players happy and invested towards a customer-based model. You need to keep fans happy to keep the money coming in. Otherwise, you just dwindle to an ever-decreasing bunch of anoraks. Not that we don't love anoraks but any successful professional club has broader appeal. Essentially, without the idea that somehow someway they'll get their act together, there's no point in Hemel Stags running a professional team, unless you're tied to and subsidised by a professional club as a farm team. We've seen this time and again in lower division "franchise" systems in the US. The US "third division" in football has something like a 96% failure rate. Independent baseball fell apart so many times that only a handful of teams go back to the early 90's. Every American Football league, including Indoor/Arena, has failed, leading to a handful of hermit clubs who join up to whatever league is going. People say it's because of college and high school teams but it's also because no promotion and relegation creates a system where clubs always stay too small to succeed.

I'm cynical enough to have recruited players based on successes we've had in the past. At one point, we put players in Oxford and Skolars and another in the Blackheath 1sts in Union. "We will make you a better rugby footballer" has been a selling point in the past. We brought a former semi-pro player back into the game from Union but he was poached after one friendly in our own clubhouse by a semi-pro club who'd turned up surreptitiously. Had they approached us and him, we'd have come up with a plan. Play for us through the summer, train with them and then join them at the end of our season. However, they took him solely to train, never played him and now he's back in Union. All the vision of Mr Magoo. We don't get to play with our toys because the big kid stole them and broke them. And they did this to other clubs too.

That needs to be committed to and fully backed. Hemel threw everything in the bin at one point to concentrate on the professional side. Southampton tried to develop their own junior league across Hampshire to develop players and open age clubs but outside forces with RL destroyed it for their own gain. The issue is that it's always viking harvest time in RL. For instance, you're an open age club in London, you find a lad, you teach him about the game. He's suited to it, it's really about knowledge and seasoning. A semi-pro club poaches him and it's tough luck but if you ask for one of their fringe players on dual reg, it's like you've asked them for change and they're pretending they lost their wallet. It has to be a broader partnership. I've said the same thing time and again. We could all get together and bake a really nice cake but people would rather scrap over the crumbs.

The revisionism in this thread is staggering.

Getting away from my problems with it being called the Chilean Super League, the addition of Cabrero is a welcome expansion of the footprint. It gives Yumbel a local rival, who are key in their slow march towards Concepcion. If you're not going to be in Santiago, which is six hours away, you need to be in Greater Concepcion, the fragmented nature of which could spin off a team in each of the cities that make up the conurbation, perhaps 10-12 teams in total. Also, Cabrero is about an hour away from Chillan, which is of similar size to Los Angeles. Fingers crossed this can go somewhere.

It's telling that, with the talk of Infowars, Alex Jones has turned on Donald Trump for getting involved with another foreign war. If you voted for Donald Trump and thought he could keep a promise, you're a mouth-breathing, six-fingered idiot but that's for another thread. My point is that left-right designations are becoming meaningless in certain regards. What a lot of centrists don't seem to realise is that the real argument right now is between moderatism and radicalism, centrism and extremism. Corbyn is the anti-war, anti-interventionist guy. A lot of people on the far right (or whatever they've branded it this year) are also anti-interventionist and it's really little wonder they'd congratulate a mainstream politician for holding similar views. What bothers me quite so much is people deliberately misunderstanding this and using it to smear Corbyn. He's holding his long-term line about war and interventionism. He's standing by his ideals and now that's somehow... dirty? FWIW, I like Corbyn but I think that 2017 was the high watermark. Problem is, who can conceivably take over from him? A wishy-washy Blairite is not going to be "different enough" from the Tories.

Wikipedia is your friend

I get it. "Obstruction is the illegal act of impeding an opponent who does not have the ball." However, that concept is not enforced in the slightest. If I pass the ball and then deliberately run into the guy in front of me, that's not obstruction. If I run a dummy line and then block a defender off, that's not obstruction. Obstruction only comes when you deliberately run behind somebody and use them as a blocker. The definition does not match enforcement.

London League pre-season double header yesterday at East London RFC; Chargers 26-10 Brixton Newham 22-36 Silverbacks

Serious, non-trolling question; isn't anti-semitism a problem across the political spectrum? It feels like people are focusing on Corbyn and the Labour Party because he's a long-term supporter of Palestinian rights. Some of the groups condemning him are frankly frightening in their views. I'll come back to that. On Nick Griffin's tweet, I would look to Italy. The Five Star Movement borrows from the socialists, the fascists, the Greens, the anarchists, the anarcho-primitivists... Christ, I could go on. There are many strange bedfellows in politics right now and it breeds obvious conspiracy theories. My favourite one of these is that Zionist groups in the UK are teaming up with neo-Nazis because both of them are now focusing on going after Muslims. I never thought I'd be glad to be away from the UK for a period. Despite my ups and downs, it's my home but it feels like a slow-motion car crash.

On the forward pass thing, the issue that is because there is a grey area, you can get situations where intentional forward passes are missed. I understand the law, I understand why it exists but it creates situations where foul play is missed. The one law I honestly don't even understand is obstruction. I've had many a discussion with people calling for crossing, which definitely doesn't exist, but then I see what I'd consider blatant obstruction missed.