Leaderboard

Is that a post for each final.

Nothing to see here, this will soon blow over and definitely won't turn into a free-for-all...oh wait...

Good Friday Wigan v Saints sold out:

I'm sorry but Gary Carter has had his blindspot for Salford sorely tested in this saga. He has consistently been the mouthpiece of the Salford club, a few tweets saying "this isn't right" about players or staff not getting paid only demonstrate just how bad things have actually gotten. "EXC: Salford chief exec delivers ‘season starts now’ message after takeover. Chris Irwin has a three-word phrase that sums up the feeling at Salford – season starts today. But he feels the RFL could have moved quicker to get their takeover done" 21st February 2025 Nobody else was writing this nonsense because nobody else believed it without any proof. Salford fans meanwhile have tried to pile on anyone (including journalists) suggesting anything other than positive sunny uplands lie ahead for the club at any point during this. He's a Salford fan and that's great, it must be really hard for him to have to cover the near demise of his own club professionally. But he has, more than any other journalist, allowed hope to cloud his perception of reality.

Just catching up this morning, can't believe some of the comments about one of our own players after a Jambo has started a rumour before a derby game. The lads only played a few games and is being written off. I get that if we bring someone half way round the world you expect them to be significantly better than a local lad, but give him a chance. Jonty must think highly of him to invest in him, so I think he deserves a bit longer, his self confidence won't exactly be flying if he reads this thread. One good game will change everything, let's hope its on good Friday. UTT

If this rabble replace Catalans with Bradford then I’m done, certainly until the NRL ride to the rescue. We’d no longer be a serious sport. There are some disgusting, small-minded, parochial, Little Englander, UKIP-lite people in our game and they’ve been given too much influence for far too long. Time for Wigan, Warrington, Hull KR and Hull FC to call the idiots’ bluff. Leeds and St Helens would soon work out which side their bread was buttered. The rest will be sorted out as evolution sorts everything else out. We should not let that tool Beaumont drag the entire sport down, smashed against the rocks of his own ego, enabled by the short-sighted support of small, lower-league clubs. Time to cut them loose if they can’t play nice.

This is a great idea for kids:

What a great stat and great to see too:

Clint is doing our recruitment he has incredible overseas talent ID has literally never got one wrong contract situation for both is Martin is end of this season galeano is end of next season The good thing about these Aussies tho is super league don’t like taking a punt on these championship Aussies only worry you have with them is they get homesick hopefully though that isn’t the case with our current ones

I suppose we could say the question is why is 10.1k for an all-pay cup games that is live on BBC not seen as a good crowd? Over 10k is a good crowd in RL terms. I had a look back on one of my early years in the late 80s when the Cup still had more glamour, and Wire hosted Saints at Wilderspool with 5.9k on in a BBC televised match.

I suspect players read these posts folks, I bet this does nothing for their confidence knowing that there own fans are calling them , leave it in the pubs and the bait rooms , let's not drag them down on here, we are town fans and better than that .UTT Also great win yesterday, well done everyone,UTT

According to Matty Johns. Tino and Payne Haas have switched to Samoa.

In my fast approaching 40 years watching the game I've never heard anyone argue that the NRL doesn't have more strength in depth or that the overall standard isn't higher. It's been a given throughout that time. Fortunately for England you can only have 13 players on the field and a match day squad of 17. We only need a strong wider squad of say 25 to give us a fighting chance. So yes Australia may have 100 players of that level and don't face the drop offs we do in standard once you get outside that but this test series won't be about that. It'll be about how good the squad is that we can put out on the day.

First visit this season and really enjoyed the atmosphere, clear the club is taking on feedback around the match day experience which was improved from last season. Music was good, service and facilities spot on for a good afternoon. Regarding the match I agree it was a strange one, felt like we could put 50 on Barrow early doors but clearly took foot off the gas, a touch lacklustre from then on with some average at best attacking kicks. With a little attacking structure, moving the ball wide we look a real dangerous side and I don't think anyone will stop us scoring this season. Fair play to Barrow they hung in and made it a good game but I just couldn't see us losing to be honest. Plenty to work on but got a feeling we will grow into a really good team as the season progresses. Drinkwater is head and shoulders above for me, class act and a pleasure to watch him guide the team in attack (minus a few dodgy kicks)

You've got to be very careful on here to pay due deference to Leigh, especially on a weekend where they have won a game. Even where that means including one of their prop forwards in a thread that is ostensibly about half back selections.

Beaumont really does believe that Leigh are the best supported club in the world because their home attendance is X% of the population of Leigh. It's an attitude that believes individual clubs cannot draw from outside the narrow selection of streets around their ground, and the sport as a whole can't expand because Royston Vasey. The whole ethos that says there are heartlands and they count for more than non heartlands, whatever, needs to die. I come back to: why did the Editor of League Express say clubs must come together to save Salford but never suggested the same for West Wales, Skolars or Cornwall?

Gary Carter has told sections of the supporter base what they want to hear, and I get it. As a fan in this situation, you want something to cling onto. The level of vitriol directed at people like Matt Shaw has been excessive and needless in my view. He (amongst others) has questioned the information coming (or not coming) out of Salford and the Salford supporters have needlessly piled on. That said, I don't necessarily think Shaw's (and I'm not picking on him, but he's an easy example) style of online journalism is necessarily suited to this sort of story and it does expose the lack of journalistic skill / knowledge for this sort of thing in RL. RL journalists are good at transfer stories, but not particularly strong at deeper-dive investigative trawls through company finances - that's David Conn or Kieran Maguire territory, and we don't have those sorts of people covering RL. I suspect that's largely down to an online content business model around RL (the sort that keeps the like of Callum Walker in gainful employment), as well as the fact that quality of journalist probably doesn't need to trouble themselves with covering RL.

This is how I've seen it as well. The way that certain sections of the supporter base have gone after particular members of the press when this story has been covered has been far from rational or dignified. I can completely understand why Salford fans have been defensive about critique of their club, but I don't think it's fair for them to be offended at the "RL Family™" when that family starts thinking "not this again?". I think even the most staunch SRD supporter would have to admit that the club, and certain people in its hierarchy, have not conducted themselves brilliantly in what is a saga that goes back much further than this winter/spring.

The boy has a ticket. It'll be his first sporting experience.

This is where I don't quite understand the RFL and the easy wins they walk past. Sales have been amazing but shout it from the rooftops and drive more. Everton close to a sell out 'we think' but let people know day in, day out! 45k sold, 48k sold, 50k sold and so on. It's a few tweets, that'll take seconds to bang out but it's really powerful I find at Wigan and at other clubs like Leigh. It'll shift the rest of the Everton tickets in no time and get people moving on to Wembley. If you need to be creative with the truth, so be it.

I thought the crowd looked fine at Warrington, and the atmosphere came across well. That crowd would have course have been at or near a sell out at a number of SL Clubs, and praised to the heavens accordingly. I simply can’t see any reason to complain about it. The day Warrington getting 11k for a cup game televised on BBC is the biggest issue we face will be a happy one for the game.

When I arrived in London from Oz in 1980 I picked up a copy of the Australasian Express to discover there was a RL club called London Colonials nearby. A phone call was answered by an Englishman, Gordon Anderton, who was Chair of the London Amateur Rugby League( just 5 clubs) but was also doing all the admin for the transient Colonials One thing led to another and Hemel joined the London League that grew to three divisions of 27 teams under Gordon's management (such was the influence of the newly arrived Fulham RLFC). I remember going to his funeral. The London League really suffered in the late 1990s with fewer and fewer clubs being able to fulfill fixtures. In (1999) it became impossible to keep the winter competition going and the secretary gave up. A few of us on the committee (Andy Johnson, Mark Hutton) stayed on to try getting it going again playing in the summer. I was the new secretary. That first season (2000?) there were only four clubs willing to give it a go. I've lost my records from the time, but I recall Skolars, Elmtree and somewhere up in Essex (I don't remember Hemel that season). There was no chance they were going to be able to play each other all home and away, so I came up with a Merit League system whereby teams got points for winning, but also for completing home and away pairs and traveling something like 50 miles. By the time I stepped down in the mid-Noughties, we had built the League back up to 8-10 teams. The records will be somewhere in my garage. I'll try to dig them out at some point and add them to this strand. {LARL London Amateur Rugby League)

And yet some still believe that they add nothing to the game and are just a drain on resources.

Two things I can't understand; 1. The stupidity of players not staying on their feet for the play-the-ball, knowing this will be penalised. 2. The negative comments about the commentary and Sharon in particular. For me Sharon (also Matt Newsum) has a likeable sense of enjoyment of the game as it's happening. This in contrast with others who state the obvious or overload us with facts and figures.

The club is very disappointed by attendances and is probably losing significant amounts of money. We have four home games against teams who will bring significant numbers ie Featherstone, Widnes, Bradford and Halifax. There is then the home game against Toulouse and, fingers crossed, a home semi final and possibly a play off game or two. They really have to do anything on their power to get the money in off those games as we know Barrow , Hunslet and probably Sheffield will not bring many. People won't dig into their own pockets forever to cover loss and if we don't get the money in,we can't expect the quality of squad we are enjoying watching currently to be our new norm. We tried offering it cheap and it hasn't worked.

The club reduced yesterday’s game down to £12and it didn’t get them any where, I’m happy to pay now and I would say only a small amount pay on the day but that is a personal choice, not a club pushing up prices, we can’t have it every which way, we have to stand up and support the club or the current owners have every right as we do to make there choices to stop all the hardwork and money there putting in.

I think it was @Derwent who asked a question which went unanswered but which, I think, if it is as was suggested could go some way to genuinely explaining the delay and also lack of transparency. Essentially, Salford converted their ownership structure in the last go round. Fans bought shares but of the genuine "we own this now" kind, not the 'shares' often offered. This moved the club into being fan owned and in that model it can't simply be sold. There are processes to go through. Now, assuming the above is true (and I didn't see it corrected), the way that fan ownership was done was weird, the lack of actual fan ownership behaviour even weirder, and the fact that nobody can even talk about what is being bought and sold now is the weirdest. But they call could be linked by incompetence, hastily taken decisions, and a complete lack of understanding how to get out of the mess without being implicated in something that was naive at best and, potentially, "that's not now it should have been done and now you'll have to explain all this to HMRC" at worst.

The lack of basic financial understanding by journalists throughout this saga has been a real eye opener. It was very clear that the “words and figures” didn’t match and some (very) basic research would have allowed them to ask much more meaningful questions at an earlier stage but if you “live by the click” then the result is what we have seen

Yet, the 'Wigan man' Wane absolutely loves the bones of Jack Welsby, Matty Lees and Morgan Knowles. Figure that out! We don't need rubbish like this ahead of an Ashes series. Williams, Smith and Lewis are 3 superb 'English' players. Club bias needs to be shelved, full stop. Forget about Wane, it needs to be given the boot by the fans. Pick zero Wigan players, I couldn't care less, I'm 41 years old and just want to see us beat the Aussies, regardless of who has the shirt on.

£24 for a walk-up is the highest fee in the league and higher than some clubs in Super League. Castleford is £20 & £22 walk-up. I've no issue in there being a difference but personally I think that could put off 'passing trade'.

Great game yesterday. Whoever is doing our Aus recruitment should take a bow. Though I wonder how long it will take the usual suspects to come sniffing round Martin and Galeano. I hope we’ve got them on decent contracts?

Not enjoying this rivalry anymore! Haha Bring back the 2000s.

Drinkwater as predicted is to good for this comp and should be in SL and was head and shoulders above anyone else on the field, but I suppose that's what probably the highest earner in the comp gets you. 80 minutes from Wembley is all that matters with an underwhelming score line and performance, I was expecting a 50 pointer after 10 minutes and pre game. Is it just me who isn't in favour of using the DR lads and bringing loans in with the squad we have got ? I really struggle to buy into that and takes the gloss off for me and I know it does with several others who were at the game.

Computers follow pre-programmed algorithms, they don't think, random numbers on your casio are generated by producing a seed number (start number) and then following the algorithm. If you know the algorithm and the seed you can predict your random numbers. The seed is the start point, which you can randomly produce from the same algorithm and then get the seed to change but what follows is a mathematical progression. JonM replied about more modern and larger sophisticated computers that can produce more randomness but eventually they still follow what they are told to do. More randomness can be introduced by instead of using the computer to generate the starting seed produce it from a random external influence, with modern speeds using these techniques add to randomness without seeing a lower performance (when tried earlier external randomness wasn't efficient), however they still follow a pre-programmed path. Computers follow instructions, you can disrupt the instructions, but at the end of the day they are robotic despite what the AI gurus tell you.* AI is a long way off being as smart as people think, that's why they can't pull a news story together without dropping real serious bollx.

Nonsense. There is nothing to support the claim that there should be 15k there today.

All credit to Barrow today you'll certainly know the way to boundary park for the league game , but having always liked you from afar you was clearly missing a few key forwards today and that told in the end from the end of the first half to the last 20 mins thought you was the better team , Ritson is a lethal weapon in the championship good to see him back with you doing what he does best , you deserved to beat us in the league and you gave a great performance this afternoon good luck for the rest of the season

Not going to make a judgement on the man going on the pitch as he clearly wasn't well and he's been a loyal fan for years as has been mentioned , but the stewards where worse than useless had that been someone with much worse intentions the touch judge could have been in a lot of danger , whatever we feel about any officials performance the least they deserve is to know they are protected from any physical violence

Thought Cloughies best one was when he said to Larry LLoyd well done you have won two caps in one match .Your first and your last.Only Clougie.

If litten keeps performing the way he is surly he gets a consideration at hooker.

A club set up with minimal support, no real foundation, small crowds, no history and few results have far less value than a club with hundreds of years of history, deep roots and previous success. There is no comparison. There's got to be some proving of worth beyond just getting out of the starting traps.

Quoting myself but based on latest post, looks like the club is kind of doing this. Online tickets £20 and on the door £24. It's a choice I guess.

Great to see the club are already promoting the haven game, seen a few signs about the game which is good to see. I think a decent day could see the biggest derby gate for some time. Of course Wigan v Saints on live at 3pm doesn’t help any club getting people through the gates.

Ditto empty car parks, why do people park in the space next to you in a completely empty (bar the on space your car is in) car park

Precisely. There’s none so blind as those who will not see. I believe three things to be true. 1. You can make an argument for Williams on the “safe pair of hands” basis, and not wanting to change a pairing with miles under the bonnet before an Ashes series. You can do so recognising that Lewis is the better player, and admitting that you’re being cautious out of fear, rather than trying to win from the front foot. 2. Wane will pick Williams and Smith even if Hull KR miraculously won the Cup and Grand Final playing against Williams in the former and Smith in the latter, with Lewis leading the league in combined assists and trys again, because they came through The Wigan Club system and he is a parochial man. 3. Australia would just pick the best player.

Yeah I'm not having that either. A small sample size I know but in the last few years I've grown friendly with a family, who we always seem to meet on holiday, from Warrington whose kids are fanatical about Warrington and whose Dad is/was more of a Football fans from Liverpool. He also now follows Warrington too. They are a pretty good example of people that have moved to the town. I'm not saying by any means that this is the case for everyone but it's not as one way as being claimed either. Again, and I raise this point a lot, Warrington were a team who averaged 3,743 40 years ago and barely went above 5k for a good decade after. I just don't buy that Warrington haven't attracted some of these new demographics or increased their support.

You've ruined it.

Dave as someone who has spent many years at Oldham, the Challenge Cup at Wembley has always been the dream. Mike Ford and the real Oldham fans know that but really hope they go on and taste Wembley in the 1875 Cup.

Thought we played well for the majority of the game but definitely overplayed our hand in the first half butchering 4 or 5 guilt edged chances. Then that crazy last 10 mins of the half after the stoppage where we didn't touch the ball again until half time. Second half I felt like we dominated from start to finish and the tries Barrow scored were absolutely superb bits of skill that you almost can't stop. Barrow were very good again as they were missing several big players but they tackled their hearts out and then scored 3 cracking tries from kicks. Individually I thought PLT was superb and had his best game in an Oldham shirt. Thought he started this season slowly but his 3 or 4 games have been great. Drinkwater was class again with his passing supreme at the line and then he scored a cracker himself. McDonald has some brilliant moments but was definitely trying too hard. When he just ran hard he was obviously way too good for this level. Think we'll have to smarten up a few area's for next week against Fev but were on the right track I think.