Dave T

Fair, I don't know the capacity changes, but I would question about demand as per my earlier post, the stand at Cas is dire, I'd be surprised if there wasn't demand for these seats. Every other stadium has that demand.

It's only a waste if the new development happens quickly. And of course it could be said for other developments but the vast majority of clubs in SL, if not all now play in better grounds than when SL started. I'm not being critical of Cas' efforts, I agree with you about the difficulties, but that's the point. They can have improvements now guaranteed, or maybe some plans may come to fruition sometime in future, or not. I'm afraid they are at the point that guaranteed improvements are needed.

The problem here is that there is no certainty that their full development will ever happen. On that basis, improving what they have now makes sense. If their future development was 100% guaranteed then I'd agree with you.

I thought they seemed really low tbh. 340k and 380k average. We've certainly had much higher in the recent past.

That's a rather disingenuous read though. The outcome will be new modern seats in the stadium.

Other clubs don't have those high boards.

My point wasn't related to you or anyone specifically, it was that we shouldn't give undue prominence to viewpoints because they can be noisy. The noisiest crowd aren't always the largest. Imo Catalans have been received warmly, as have other expansion clubs, despite noisy criticism. It's easy to end up in echo chambers and believe a certain view, when it is more useful to study the data and see that viewing figs, crowds and travelling numbers can be high for them. On the Season ticket point, again, I don't think in reality a large portion of people are that bothered by this kind of thing. Many season ticket holders get good value anyway, and these concessions are for the lowest quality stand. But even then plenty of season ticket holders take advantage of it by bringing new fans along. Someay grumble, but the evidence appears to be there that the fans appreciate the good crowd, kids present and better atmosphere.

I've no issues with making overseas clubs pay (although this method is clumsy) but I was addressing your point that fans are not friendly to expansion efforts. I don't find teh main are like that at all tbh mate.

How was a lack of humility an issue for them?

Yes, I agree with that interpretation - and that can always be thrown at a club that has often been the best team over 12m but then fallen at the last hurdle - my personal view on that is that we have always been very competitive in our Grand Finals and each of them could have been Wire wins - hence my point that I'm not sure it's cultural. I think sometimes it is a claim that is thrown about lazily, often by fans when they are frustrated. They didn't complain about culture when we beat Saints at Wembley, but it became an issue when we lost in the playoffs to Cas a month later. I do think the culture point is lazily used in the way you describe, and I do think that was the interpretation that Powell had when he came in and treated long-serving players like a piece of s***, many who have gone on to to a good job at other clubs since.

We shouldn't let some loudmouths become the voice of the sport. The likes of Catalans have been embraced with huge travelling numbers and many large crowds when they travel here (admittedly with discounts in many cases) - in the main fans have been absolutely welcoming. They are many fans 2nd team. Similar with TWP, whilst there are many loud dissenters, we shouldn't see that as RL fans not being welcoming, many travelled there and many wanted them to do well.

I always make this challenge, and I feel I have to do it again. History has been rewritten with Wire and we are an easy target because we've never made that final step to win a Grand Final, but we have won LLS, Challenge Cups and appeared in a handful of Grand Finals. We haven't been the basket case that many claim. We were decent under Price, consistently a top 4 team, and even beat Saints at Wembley at their peak. We were falling just short and made the change to Powell in the hope that a more expansive style would see us over the line. This became a whole "the culture needs changing" thing which didn't appear to have much basis when you look at our results and many performances. Powell was an absolute car crash and it was a dire 2 years. We now look to be approaching what we were doing pre-Powell and that's a good starter for 10. The next step is progressing to become champions. The biggest mistake was key people believing the whole 'culture' thing as the issue when we were one of the best teams in the country.

Yeah, just from the photos it looks low. I wondered if they were going to replace that fencing with more modern lower boards.

I think there is also the case for considering people who don't go because they don't have a nice place to sit with their kids. Maybe this is attractive to new fans. If I think about Wire's move, the seating is far more popular than the old stand that Wilderspool had.

I get that, and it aint a criticism, but a huge criticism of the last 20 years is that everything has been based on future promises rather than actual improvements. Now we are seeing tangible improvements instead of 3d images. There are a couple of things - funding has been made available hasn;t it from the council? And maybe for the first time these minimum standards actually mean something instead of the toothless ones in the past that allowed for too many allowances. This is something that many have wanted for years - minimum standards that drive change.