IMG yesterday announced the provisional grades for all 36 professional clubs, with those 36 now given a year in which to improve ahead of the 2025 season when the grades will come into being.
It’s fair to say that things didn’t exactly run smoothly for a number of clubs throughout the day with three gaffes standing out.
Here are those three:
Castleford debacle
It wouldn’t have been rugby league had there not been an incident even before the grades were released at 10am. That honour fell to Castleford Tigers who, at 9.50am, released a statement explaining there had been an issue with financial data that would not be taken into consideration for the grade which the West Yorkshire club would receive later that morning.
Managing director Mark Grattan said: “On Monday we were given a grading score with just a headline number for the four categories. Each of the categories were as expected, as was the overall grading score. As a result of this, we did not challenge anything ahead of the 1pm Deadline on Tuesday 24th October.
“At 7pm yesterday evening, I received a phone call from Tony Sutton, CEO of the RFL to inform me that the RFL had made a mistake on one of the data lines in finance. This meant they were taking half a point off us which moved us down to 13th. At that point, we realised that the finance score was incorrect. Within an hour we spotted a missing data line that we had not submitted.
“I sent all of the supporting evidence to the RFL expecting our error to be amended as the RFL’s error was and we believe other clubs’ scores were amended. We were then informed later yesterday evening that due to the lateness of the information the grades would be published with the RFL’s amendment, but without ours and they would also allow us to appeal and they would be announcing that as part of the grading story.
“We are extremely disappointed with the RFL’s decision as both ourselves and the RFL made an error but the RFL error masked our error on the scores which meant up to 7pm yesterday evening, we believed our score to be correct.
“We will issue a further statement this afternoon with more detail into our IMG grading.”
It’s fair to say that Castleford fans were dismayed by the statement.
Two Wigan clubs
Not only were Wigan given a place of second in the IMG grading table, they were also 31st.
If you don’t understand, then take a look at number 31 and the club badge represented. Workington Town suddenly became the Wigan Warriors, with the latter’s crest adorned next to Town’s name.
That would certainly be a funny old merger!
Keighley’s Error 404
An Error 404 message appears when website content has been removed or moved to another URL.
Unfortunately for the Keighley Cougars, perhaps the most vociferous opponents of IMG’s plans to ‘re-imagine’ rugby league, this proved to be the case when a link to the club’s statement couldn’t be found.
The Error 404 message popped up with rugby league fans seeing the amusing side.
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