Martyn Sadler

And you haven't yet got the hang of stating opinions with evidence to back them up.

I'm just stating some facts. I didn't say I thought it was a good thing for Ralph to have brought IMG on board.

And one thing I forgot to add was that the person who was responsible for bringing IMG into the sport was none other than Nigel's replacement Ralph Rimmer, who you have also accused of "poor leadership" and "administrative incompetence" over the last 15 years. The truth is it's always a lot easier to run an organisation that you have nothing to do with, rather than one that you are actually responsible for. If you're a Hull KR supporter, you might be getting some more good news soon.

Thanks for pointing out that part of the secret of the success of the 2013 World Cup was the excellent team that Nigel appointed to run the competition alongside himself. I'm sure you would agree that making good appointments is a crucial skill for any organisation's CEO.

Your memory is wrong but thanks for your apology.

I've spent more than 30 years criticising the RFL for not being great so it's hard to imagine a more incorrect assertion. I agree with much of what you say here. What you do with the money is of course important and in my view far more of it should have been invested in marketing the game. But to invest it, you have to earn it first, which is why I think Nigel Wood's contribution to the RFL's financial health should be acknowledged. And, at the risk of people accusing me once again of being a Wood fanboy, it's useful to remember that Wood was the tournament director for the 2013 World Cup, which I agree was a great success, but had nothing to do with the 2022 version, other than generating the £25 million government support for it. The bad decisions made by the organisers of that tournament were nothing to do with him. You are right to say we are in a whole new world and on balance I think the association with IMG is a positive one, not so much because of what they are proposing, but because of the signal it sends out that our sport is conscious of the need to modernise. But, having said that, many clubs are still teetering on a knife edge, given the reduction in funding they have suffered since Wood's departure and ultimately IMG will be judged on whether they can reverse this trend.

I'm not sure when I admitted any such thing. If I did, I must have been drunk. And I don't drink. So you're trolling again. Matt Dwyer is on my email contact list and has been from the start, although he doesn't always reply to emails. We'll invite him onto our Podcast and see whether he responds. Rhodri Jones will be joining us next week. As for my "mega plan", I think you'll find that West Wales would never have played Wigan under my plan, at least until they had reached Wigan's level.

I would be grateful if you would try hard not to read my mind, or anyone else's for that matter. Try to restrict yourself to replying to the points I actually make. If you want my view on Nigel Wood, it is that he rescued the game from financial disaster, allowing the RFL to build a solid financial base, which is essential if the governing body is to be in a position to do anything else. He was politically very adept and an excellent negotiator. But his PR ability was very limited. I think he should have remained as the RFL's Finance Director with a much more outgoing individual appointed as CEO, although the clubs are difficult to manage as a group by anyone who doesn't understand the underlying tensions among them. But the truth is that without financial stability, it's hard to achieve non-financial objectives in any organisation. Richard Lewis may have had a much smoother persona than Nigel but he did two things that impacted badly on Rugby League - abolishing Great Britain and introducing a poorly thought out licensing system, which ultimately failed. So I'm not sure he deserves as much credit as you give him. You seem to make assertions without any evidence to back up your claims. And in relation to your final paragraph, I was never close to the regime run by Nigel Wood, much to my regret. Wood was reluctant to speak to anyone in the media, including me, which was one of his major faults, while his opponents were only too happy to. As for IMG, I'm not negative about them generally, but I'm not a member of the IMG fan club, as many on here appear to be. I'm happy to acknowledge the good work they do, on digital media and the deal they have negotiated for coverage in France, for example, while being critical where criticism is merited, such as some of the more illogical elements of the grading system. You are perfectly entitled to view IMG through rose-coloured spectacles, but some of us prefer to be a little more realistic.

I sometimes think you must be a Russian bot who comes on this forum with the sole purpose of making me smile. Again you've succeeded brilliantly.

A rather eccentric comment. There wasn't 20 years of administrative incompetence. The media rights value was £40 million per annum as recently as 2021, which was the final year of a five-year deal and the RFL persuaded the government to cough up £25 million to support the World Cup planned for 2021. If that's incompetence, I wouldn't mind seeing more of it. The RFL was flat broke after the 2000 World Cup and it came perilously close to liquidation. But it gradually built up its financial strength year by year from then onwards. You can check this information by looking at its annual accounts. The 'incompetence' came when the clubs, led by Wigan's Ian Lenagan, succeeded in their plan to oust Nigel Wood as the RFL CEO and then created what was effectively a breakaway body, wasting a fortune in the process before realising their error and coming back into the fold, but only after having effectively reneged on their contract with Sky, which goes some considerable way to explain why the contract is now effectively halved. I do agree with you that we would be much better spending more of our income on improved marketing, including some of the work that IMG have done, rather than blowing the same amount on Aussie imports, which is why I would significantly reduce the overseas quota over time.

No, the BBC offered the possibility of a larger audience. There certainly could be more eyeballs on the game than before and the clubs should be able to monetise that situation, although the confirmation of the deal has come too late to make a significant difference in their current financial year, which leaves them with two more years. I've previously revealed the £440,000 per annum figure. You should pay attention. The RFL has confirmed it to me. The RFL paid the bill this year by 'selling' the game's betting rights to IMG.

“If you’re a rugby league fan, it’s never been this good,” says Matt Dwyer. I don't think you could argue with that point if you want to see as many games as possible on television, either on mainstream channels or on the new streaming service. In business terms, it's an example of a company trying to raise its turnover by generating more income from its existing customer base. That isn't necessarily a faulty strategy, but it only has limited scope. “Every sport is trying to get on the BBC, I promise you – and we’ve done it. It’s prime free-to-air exposure. They all want it, and rugby league has it," adds Dwyer. “It will take a while for the exposure to translate into more fans, which translates into growing the sport, but that’s the basis of what we want to do. The scale of exposure we have now versus last – or any – season is unprecedented for this sport. The amount of other sports that would love to have the exposure we’re having moving forward is.. well, all of them, except football." That may well be true, but the question facing IMG and Rugby League more generally is precisely how to attract those new fans, which is crucial for the game but which he isn't yet in a position to clarify. There will be ten Super League matches this season broadcast on BBC channels at varying times and on various channels, including BBC 3. The problem with last year's Channel 4's coverage was that it was too intermittent to generate a significant following and the BBC's coverage could be similar and Rugby League could once again look like a filler rather than a major part of the broadcaster's sports output. How will the BBC promote its Rugby League coverage? Whatever contract has been signed, for no money apparently, I hope it includes some clauses about the degree of promotional support the BBC will give its Rugby League coverage. Otherwise it will have limited value. The problem for Rugby League is the decline in broadcast income from £40 million per year to £21.5 million per year under the current contract. At a recent meeting with Sky, the RFL was told to get its act together to generate more eyeballs for its coverage if that decline is to be reversed. What will be the impact of the new streaming service in that regard? The Chairman of one leading club told me this week that he expects his club to lose £2 million in 2024 and more in 2025, when the new rules about how many games players can play take effect, necessitating larger squads. In the meantime we are paying IMG £440,000 per year for the benefit of their advice. I hope we are getting value for money, although I'm not quite as sanguine as some of the more optimistic sorts on this thread. For me, the jury is still out.

In this week's episode of the League Express Podcast, Editor Martyn Sadler and Host Jake Kearnan preview round 1 of the Super League season, discuss the signing's of Tom Burgess, Harry Newman and Lee Kershaw. They discuss the Rob Burrow award, Penrith Panthers star Jarome Luai being rule out of the World Club Challenge against Wigan and the RFL's new broadcasting deal with the BBC.

I agree with this point of view and I'm surprised that Tony Collins, a sports historian who I have great respect for, doesn't also appear to recognise this point, instead leading the campaign to remove Sunderland's name from the trophy. I should finally add that when it comes to having names on trophies, Sunderland was in fact much more deserving than Lance Todd in terms of his achievements in Rugby League. And in saying that I am not proposing the re-naming of the Lance Todd Trophy. In the same vein, I was also glad to see Neil Fox recognised recently when Wakefield named their new stand in his honour. But I would have thought that a player who scored more points than anyone else over a long career would have been worthy of a major award within the game as a whole.

Hearsay is evidence based on what has been reported to a witness by others rather than what he or she has observed or experienced. Clearly the comment apparently made to Robert Gate by Roy Francis accords with that definition, in that we are relying on someone's interpretation of a conversation long ago. It may be true, but if so it would tend to be corroborated by other circumstantial evidence, of which none exists, as I have tried to point out. So you may believe it, but that doesn't make it true. Having said all that - and I think we've exhausted this conversation - I am very happy to see Rob Burrow's name being attached to the MoM award for the Grand Final. I simply wish that this change had been handled in a better way.

If he had been, I'm not sure he would have been nominated by his fellow journalists after his death for a trophy to be named in his honour. The racism allegation is based solely on hearsay - a comment made by Roy Francis to Robert Gate many years after Sunderland's death. A complete archive of Sunderland's writing is held at the University of New South Wales. In correspondence I had with the Professor responsible for the preservation of the archive, he made the point that there was no indication of racism in anything that Sunderland had ever written, but that there was a lot of racism about in Australia in the pre-war period, so he didn't rule it out completely. Nonetheless, it would be surprising, if Sunderland had been a racist, that he would have involved himself in Rugby League, which was known for having significant Indigenous participation in the 1920s. He was clearly a complex character who could easily antagonise people but his contribution to Rugby League is hard to argue with and shouldn't be traduced on the basis of hearsay when he was unable to respond to the allegation. https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/sunderland-harry-11803

If Harry Sunderland had been your great grandfather I suspect you would have felt a relationship with him because of your shared love of Rugby League and you wouldn't have been too happy not to be consulted about his name being excised from the Grand Final. Another relatively minor point, but one that's worth making, is that Harry was a great promoter of the game and went to considerable lengths to try to develop the game in the USA. At the start of the 1950s he submitted a plan to the Australian Rugby League Board of Control to promote Rugby League in America and he helped the Americans play a five-match tour of France at the end of 1953, losing to the French national side 31-0 in front of 20,000 spectators at the Parc des Princes in Paris in January 1954. The International Board, in its infinite wisdom, subsequently withdrew an invitation to play in the first World Cup in 1954. So it seems ironic that, just as the game is going to America this year, Sunderland's name disappears from the Grand Final.

He had three sons, two of whom died before their first birthday. But the other, Sir Sydney Sunderland, achieved worldwide acclaim and great eminence in his field - far greater than Harry's - and died in 1993. He was the youngest ever professor appointed at the University of Melbourne and he pioneered research into the structure of nerves. He was often referred to as “the father of modern nerve surgery.” The Sunderland Society, based in America, celebrates his memory and holds regular meetings and symposia in his honour. Harry named his son after his favourite city. After Harry's death, Sydney gave his approval to the RLWA's proposal to honour his father and I would have thought it appropriate to consult his descendants about the decision to discontinue having his name attached to the award. For all I know, they might have done that, but if they had, I suspect they would have made reference to it in the press release. It would just have looked a bit classier, especially given the coincidence that Harry's son was a pioneer in research in a field related to the condition that Rob suffers from.

Check out our lates Podcast that covers a wide range of Rugby League issues.

I've argued on this forum previously that we shouldn't change the name of our leading awards and this announcement has taken me by surprise even though it was proposed by the RLWBA, of which I am a member. I agree with you that Burrow is a worthy name to attach to a trophy for the player of the match in the Grand Final, although I would have named it the Burrow-Sinfield Trophy in that case, because those two names are inextricably linked in the public consciousness for obvious reasons and both of them won the HS Trophy twice (as did Danny McGuire). Harry Sunderland's name was proposed by the Rugby League Writers' Association to be attached to the man of the match award in the Championship Grand Final after his death in 1964 and it was first awarded in 1965, with Terry Fogerty becoming the first winner. When the Championship Final in its old form was ended in 1973, with the advent of two divisions, that would have been a possible time to retire Harry Sunderland's name from the award rather than transferring it to what was effectively a new competition. Similarly, when the Super League Grand Final was established, that would have been another opportunity to retire the Harry Sunderland Trophy. But there is no obvious logic to doing this now and the announcement sheds little light on the decision. There is no indication that Harry Sunderland's descendants were consulted about this, although perhaps they were. I agree with you that if you are going to retire an award, you do it with a fanfare and create a handover scenario from one name to the other. But as it is, the decision looks a very clumsy one to me.

Jake Kearnan speaks to new St Helens captain Jonny Lomax.

At the time the article was written for Rugby League World, the Challenge Cup third round draw hadn't been made, although I'm quite surprised by your reaction to the All Stars game, which is one of the cultural and sporting highlights of the Rugby League year for men and women.

And here is the second part of League Express Podcast 25. Our thanks to Robert Hicks for his participation.

Here is the first part of what is a two-part Podcast with me, Jake Kearnan and RFL Director of Operations and Legal, Robert Hicks. We talk, naturally, about refereeing, his career, what makes a good referee and several other current issues. Part 2 will be posted soon.

Thanks for your comment. This week we have recorded the Podcast with the RFL's Rob Hicks, who has some interesting things to say. I hope you enjoy that one too.