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Lebanon have announced that there’ll be at least six domestic players in their WC squad. Not as many as I’d like to see but being realistic it’s a really positive step. I believe Greece will do something similar, but presumably not Italy. https://everythingrugbyleague.com/lebanon-rugby-league-federation-reaffirm-domestic-quota-for-world-cup-squad/

Do you mean TWP getting in via the back door of winning promotion on the pitch, while Leigh had to go through the hoops of submitting an application form?

Yes! We learned that the majority of SL clubs are only interested in themselves. This situation may never have developed if the WP had not been deprived of their share of TV money. That being the case SL is mainly responsible for that fiasco.

"Professional", lol. So they might not have to pitch in for their shirts or the bus, and might get a couple hundred bucks? I posted this is the Toronto forum a while abo, but since it's dead, I'll copy it here since it applies: Since then I've read similar comments in the Scotland RL thread, where again we go from "Oh yay, a fourth team, we can have a functioning league" to "what are the paying crowds like" If people want to ###### their money away putting the cart before the horse, I guess let em try. But when the ORL can't get more than 2 mens teams running consistently, I don't see how this will be any different.

Toronto Wolfpack clearly built a big rugby league following in Toronto, hopefully Robert Elstone hasn’t lost those fans to the game forever and they get behind this new competition.

It's interesting to note all the hoops that Leigh had to jump through before being allowed into sooperdooperleeg whilst the crazy idea of Canadian teams, and possibly American teams can get in via the back door.

https://mobile.twitter.com/johnnyddavidson/status/1366419215348072456

I believe you are a Leeds fan, so who did you see play in Toronto and Toulouse?

Looks like the Wolfpack are leaving a better legacy than Elstone. Just proving that report into the viability of RL in Canada was garbage.

When a team goes down the pan, the founders, and owners feel a bit hardy on themselves, I know as I ran an Amatuer club for two years, after that folded, I lost touch with the game for a while, I hope the Canadian keep their chins up and their sticks down, and go for it.

It's not the RFL's role to ensure the clubs aren't being run incompetently. We hear so much about how we should give these "successful businessmen" at club level their head yet we also have to hand hold them all the way? The RFL tries to strike a balance and does the basics but the clubs can't forever demand all the power and none of the responsibility.

Leigh have not been bashed, can you please show where? People have simply replied to untruths that someone stated about Toronto and Leigh by stating facts.

Oh look. Another Toronto thread is beginning to look like a Leigh bashing thread. (Always the same people though)

This is pretty much what it comes down to. If you want to sell the idea of RL being a "brilliant product", you have to invest in the product - which is predominantly the players themselves. If you want to keep the players, you need to pay them competitively. If you can't afford to do that, you need to find other, more creative, ways to keep them engaged, fulfilled and feeling valued. But instead we have club chairmen slagging them off in the press, supressing their earnings, making them train on "dog **** park" and throwing them under the bus when clubs want to wiggle out of their contracts.

Sorry I must have been dreaming when I watched it at the olympics or in the world series on sky sports or played it at school

Rather than the same old loop fixtures, would anyone buy into another trophy more? 12 team comp, drawn into 4 groups of 3 with a guarantee of two games, then semi’s and Final at a new, somewhere different 30-40k capacity stadium. Read an article the other day, regarding the charity shield. As much as I don’t buy into it, I just feel we play a lot of rugby for not a lot of trophy lifts compared to football. What fans don’t want a day out and bragging rights. and I know it’s still the same fixture, but with a different meaning would it add more? GF, Shield, Challenge Cup, and a league Cup. no more rugby just a bit more to play for.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=We9ddeYdkE8&feature=share

Call it two decades. Teams he built in the de facto football manager role at Headingley started being really competitive in 1998 about 16 months after he took over and the era ended 18 trophies later with the 2017 Grand Final. And arguably what he did as coach and founder at Sheffield was even more remarkable. If he, or anyone, ever writes it the book of Hetherington will be an amazing story.

I hope he thought that was a positive opener to get started, before making his true feelings known.

A pro 9s competition in Canada, funded by the fans, run by two people living in the north of England, looking to give 10% of the profits to the grassroots... I just don’t see how it will work, let alone make a profit or be genuinely pro. Hope I’m proven wrong. https://www.thestar.com/sports/2021/03/01/plans-announced-to-create-a-grassroots-canadian-rugby-league-co-op.html

Good luck to them, it’s ambitious but will be great if it comes off, though I think I read it’s 9s not RL. By professional though, surely they can’t mean full time professional.

An interesting observation for someone so new

I believe it will be.

cracking first post Forster. Welcome to the board

Not really, his record is unparalleled in modern British RL history.

If Davies could have stayed in Wales and played RL there, why would he have gone to Widnes?

Once this is all settled (post Covid) Toronto will be back in; I'm sure of it! (+well sort of sure)

I personally would not dismiss this. The two games are heavily linked by the way in which our game takes the Aussies surplus players who can stay playing at a decent level, their bad boys whilst they serve their bans and learn to behave, their stars who are too old for NRL but OK for here, and those up and coming Aussie lads who fancy some time abroad. In turn they like to take our best players. There really must be a value for the NRL in ensuring these links are maintained. Same for Aussie.v.Great Britain, they may not be that interested but the NRL would not like to lose the big International clashes forever. It has to be the case for me that if SKY really did stop the contract and we had to go semi-pro the game would be very badly damaged here, and this would have serious ramifications in Australia (and probably France too as they head for two clubs in Superleague) Again it seems to me there's a good case for the NRL and SL to join up to protect the sport as a whole??.

I don't think that is where criticism should be aimed mate.

That's not what happened though is it?

Do you think Widnes fans would rather have seen a club set up in Ebbw Vale than seen Jonathan Davies play for them?

Victorian junior Dean Ieremia promoted to Melbourne Storm's top 30 squad (msn.com) Really heartening to see genuine born and bred Victorians breaking into the NRL. This is what expansion is all about. Dean Ieremia played both afl and League and chose the Rugby League route. The Storm are such a clever club, their ` You can play both codes` campaign last year was such a great idea and for a sport in foreign territory puts the idea into kids heads that they can try something different. Brilliant.

I don't think it is ridiculous at all. Roby has been an outstanding player in Super League. Consistently in the top 3 in the game over here for over a decade. No one can say for sure whether he would have been a success in the NRL if he had gone there but my personal opinion is that he would have been a sensation. When you look at the NRL in recent years, the 9's who have come to the fore to push Smith as the best in the game are Damien Cook and Josh Hodgson. Cook for his running game and Hodgson for his distribution/creativity. I would suggest that at his best, Roby is a hybrid of these two... his running game has always been a huge threat while his distribution from dummy half is first class. On top of this he has a huge engine and work rate. I don't know if Roby would have been better than Cam Smith if they had been playing in opposition in the NRL. What I do believe though is that Roby would have been far far closer to him than any NRL 9 has been and would have pushed him very close as the best 9 (and maybe even the best player) in the competition.

It's a word invented in England in the 19th century and used since then in England and elsewhere to describe the sport of association football to differentiate it from rugby football. Marra.

And any crowd changes announced over the tannoy

One thing the programme doesn`t bring out is that most RL fans would have far rather seen League grow in Wales than have all these players move north.

Ouch indeed! It goes to show how unsustainable Eric Pérez's idea of teams in North America playing in the British RL structure is.

I love the game but SL is going absolutely nowhere and simply cannot break the shackles because clubs are not interested in anything but surviving the year. Would it be a shock to the system? Yes like anything new. But the NRL World Club Championship with the European winners playing the Australasian winners - all under the same brand - at least has a chance. Also, the Watch NRL app is set up for both competitions' content for viewers around the world. Members in this country would also have to justify their existence as an elite club which is sadly missing too atm.

£63k is probably more than half of the players in SL earn. That could even be higher 60%+ The gap is getting wider and wider. Those marquee signings like Inglis are really hiding the reality that many SL players struggle to reach the average national wage.

And less likely (in those days) to suffer racial abuse in the North of England. It's a very good documentary and really worth watching if you haven't seen it.

No-one is saying that, but it is being played and it is growing (and producing pro players) so that's worth acknowledging and celebrating. You've just jumped from one extreme to the other like a spoilt child. As long as the game keeps growing in areas like Wales, Bath, Coventry, Cornwall, Newcastle, London our future is assured. Can't you find a reason to be cheerful about this?

Delete Wales... insert any club anywhere in the country regarding that statement in bold.

No need to be petulant, if you going to spread such assertions, at least try and support your argument. Just because the 2 semi pro clubs are at a low ebb doesn’t mean there isn’t any interest in the game there. How do you think they’ve just got a statue sanctioned for 3 Welsh RL greats in Cardiff Bay if there’s no interest? Or Welsh schools continually performing well in the Champion Schools competition? It wasn’t long ago that York City Knights nearly went out of existence and there was little to no grassroots/junior development going on in York. Would you similarly say there’s no interest in RL in York?

The memsahib's brother. After 5 decades of acute/chronic schizophrenia.... he is now at peace. No more voices. No more paranoia. A desperately sad life ends. The memsahib is beyond grief.

In my eyes, no, just because you're trying to force an equivalence between two competitions that aren't equal in practice. You see this with the BUCS (University) competition, where there's a Premier North and Premier South, but the bottom team in Prem North will usually beat the team coming 3rd of 6 in Prem South for example. The final is almost always between two Prem North teams, and usually 3 or 4 of the Semi Finalists are Prem North teams. At League 1 level, better to let teams compete against each other and learn from their experiences, and this is without considering the validity that playing against heartland teams provide. However, I do think the Southern Conference League has a huge role to play. The standard is pretty decent and there's a fair commitment involved in terms of travelling and season length, while not suddenly claiming to be anything it isn't. In my eyes, the game would be better served expansion-wise by trying to develop the clubs in this competition (and ideally grow it further). If you had it so that teams ran a first team in the SCL, a second team in the regional leagues (i.e. Midlands League) and then some form of juniors underneath that and some link with nearby universities, you've got a pretty decent pathway. You multiply that by 16 (currently)- 36 (ideally) and you've got a strong basis for growth in the Midlands and the South. You could even have it a requirement of League 1 entry that teams must be part of this comp for 3-5 years first. It would demonstrate a commitment to developing strong foundations, allow the clubs to get set up off-field and the SCL is probably strong enough to challenge fringe League 1 players. This pre-entry is similar to what Cov Bears did with their NCL membership and that seems to have served them well in terms of organisation.

Good stuff. Real expansion.

I'm just not sure how it would ever be a meaningful exercise, unless it was done in great detail. Had they done this at TWP over this period, they would either of a ) cancelled the project instantly due to the odd financial position, or b ) seen that Argyle had the money and therefore everything looked ok. A challenge is that there aren't often piles of cash in the bank at clubs, meaning a slight variation to forecast leads to shortfalls, or an investor moving on could lead to issues, and then we have the poor behaviour of clubs/owners who act like this when they don't necessarily need to. Ultimately, I think this kind of thing can only be managed after the event in many cases - an audit would often only tell you what went wrong - I'm unsure what the RFL can do that would be meaningful above and beyond punishing clubs.

Maybe, as an ambitious player, he'd have seen the Widnes side of the time and fancied the chance of a trophy or two. Especially as there wouldn't have been the social stigma he suffered back in Wales if he'd been transferring from one RL club to another instead of crossing codes.

Your analysis is exactly what prompted my response but on closer examination of the paragraph in question, that you have highlighted, I am tempted to think that perhaps the first sentence and second sentence should not be taken as one but the achievement of the second fulfilling the first goal - `sustainable community RL clubs not teams`.. an admirable goal. Their definition of a sustainable club, their ultimate goal, is to have what is listed in the second sentence. Unfortunately the wording is ambiguous and sounds like you have to have those things straight up before you can even be recognised as a club. Although on reading it again just now, I`m not so sure. Definitely could have been worded better and should be cleared up if this is effectively their `mission statement` to any aspiring clubs who may just think `too hard.`