nadera78

But if you were doing that you wouldn't be spending £200,000 on Plough Lane, plus £X on Rosslyn Park and Richmond as training grounds, when you could continue to pay a per hour rate to hire Ealing Trailfinders. Whatever the club's plan is, taking a step back and seeing the lay of the land clearly isn't it.

This is incorrect. The Northern Ford Premiership clubs wanted out of the contract and negotiated a fee to walk away from future payments. They were confident they would find a broadcaster elsewhere, which of course never happened. A good few years passed before Sky offered them a deal for Thursday night games, but paid only for production costs and no rights fees. Then Premier Sports came along. The Championship broadcast rights have never been worth a penny, and the figures Nigel Wood made public five years ago where for the distributions to each league not how much Sky were paying for each one.

I don't even know where to start, frankly. It's all been said so many times before. Perhaps one of the universities offering sports business degrees should offer a module on the London Broncos under David Hughes' ownership as the perfect example of how to destroy a club. Can you imagine making the decision to pay an extra £200K a year in rent whilst simultaneously cutting your playing budget to the extent you need to go part-time? And in the process dragging your remaining 200 diehard fans to a 9,000 capacity venue? I'm glad I've already checked out emotionally. I give it 2 years before the club is wound up.

Have they written a list of 16 clubs they're prepared to kill off? No, of course not. Do they know that by withdrawing almost all their funding some clubs will cease to operate overnight and others will wither even further than they already have to the point of being zombie clubs playing in a 3rd tier that barely operates? Yes, yes they do. Are the perfectly comfortable with that if it means they secure themselves? Absolutely.

Smaller SL clubs look at this proposal and think; if they stay in SL they'll continue to receive central funding that broadly covers the salary cap and keeps them in existence. If they get relegated they'll receive less money, but a sum that means they can still put a decent squad together and have a shot at promotion. The bigger Championship clubs know their futures will be secured in the new SL2. They will receive more central funding than currently, the gap between them and SL will be closer, they'll have a shot at promotion to SL, and won't have to worry about relegation because the 3rd tier will have gone (or at least diminished massively). Deams of being a yo-yo club remain in place. If securing their own futures means jettisoning 16 other clubs in the process then 20 rugby league clubs are perfectly fine with that.

I only noticed it in an article about Greenwood being left out of the England squad and Jamaica sniffing around.

There are just so many people eligible for multiple nations these days (IIRC Gareth Southgate said half the players in England's age group teams are also eligible for other countries) and international sports bodies are under pressure to at least be seen to understand and make some allowance for that. It also, as RL can attest, increases competitiveness in tournaments.

It seems as if football changed its eligibility rules when I wasn't looking. It used to be that once a player appeared in a competitive senior game for his country he was locked into playing for them and no-one else. Now it appears that you can switch if you have played no more than 3 competitive senior matches before turning 21. More and more sports are allowing players to switch between nations, albeit with different ways of regulating it.

We've spent the entire Nigel Wood / Ralph Rimmer era making decisions with the aim of getting on board the bigger Championship clubs. All that's happened is we've damaged our top end (SL - the bit that actually makes us money) so that those clubs can pretend they are professional and have a serious shot at competing with the big boys. 2x10s is just another marker down that road to nowhere. If we were being honest about where the sport is we'd be focussing our (diminishing) resources on SL and the community game.

I think this will end being the direction of travel. And the thing is, we can do all of these things within the known and understood parameters of the sport because we have done them at some time or other in the past - we've had fewer replacements, we've had a 5m defensive line, etc, etc. That means we needn't pay any attention to those typing "the game's gone soft" from the safety of their mobile phones.

You couldn't be more wrong if you tried. The Broncos sold over 10,000 tickets to the Challenge Cup Final but you know what - the club didn't follow up on it. On the field the team fell apart with a couple of disastrous coaching appointments and expensive signings, and off it Branson just assumed (like every other owner of the club before and since) that people knew they existed and would magically make their way to the ground to watch them play. If you look at Branson's career closely he did the same thing at the Broncos as with many many of his other businesses - he got involved because he was launching an airline in Australia (there's always a bigger picture with him) and wanted to piggy back off the WCC. He turned up for a few publicity shots, attended a handful of games, got Jono Coleman from his radio station to attend a couple of times, and that was about it. When his Aussie airline was up and running, and it became obvious 10,000 people weren't going to attend every week simply because his name was attached to the club, he packed up and left. He's done the same with scores of other businesses - although these days he mainly leeches off taxpayer handouts for his railway and healthcare businesses. The many, many failings of the club are not because people aren't interested in RL but because the club is an absolute disaster zone of a sports team (and business). One that has seen its current owner turn a 4,000 average attendance into one currently hovering around 200, and in the process drive away fans of 25/30/40 years standing.

To be honest, and obviously none of us has the full scope on the exact details of the bids, none of them look brilliant - from a distance anyway. Redcliffe intuitively feels the strongest but there must be question marks over them given the aim is to have a team play out of Lang Park. Firehawks has the location but clearly isn't as strong as Redcliffe in other respects, which is emphasised by this talk of merger at a ridiculously late stage. Ipswich has the player base but not a lot else. I'd hoped someone would come along and really wow us with their bid but, going by the information that's been made public, that isn't the case. They all feel like a very noticeable compromise.

I think I'm right in saying that every PL, EFL and National League club is eligible to receive funding from the PL for the Premier League Kicks programme - which is probably where Wigan Athletic get the resources to do their schools development work. That sort of funding gives them the opportunity to go into schools and offer more than simply the odd football session, I've heard that in some schools football clubs have taken over not quite the entire PE offering but certainly a substantial part of it. For schools it's a no brainer because it's all paid for by someone else and their budgets have been cut massively over the past decade.

Just read on a football forum that 1 month into the Championship season only 4 clubs are tracking attendances above pre-pandemic levels, with two of those being newly promoted clubs and a third being Coventry who have returned to their home city after a few seasons away. That's after 18 months without crowds. Early days, obviously, but it will be interesting to see how that progresses given all the above discussion about RL.

Whatever the state of Wigan, I'm not sure anyone should be listening to a poster whose main involvement in rugby league is cheerleading for a dying London Broncos to pump money into his favoured soccer club.

That would be a complete waste of everybody's time and resources. We know what those players can do, same goes for Roby and the like, so let's use this as an opportunity to blood some younger players.

Only prediction I'm making here: London v Sheffield to have the lowest attendance in the club's history.

Every true RL fan always has space for one more polyester shirt in the bottom drawer.

If Koukash is worth £2bn why has he never made any of the rich lists? Why did he not buy Salford's stadium and the land around it as promised? Why did he not build Swinton a stadium as promised? Why did he not start a club in Liverpool? Or west Cumbria? Or the NRL? Or buy the Titans? He's got more money than me, no doubt about that, but he's a BS artist. No wonder he gets on so well with Beaumont. Their proposed partnership at Leigh, assuming it's not more hot air from Koukash, will last how long?

Game got a little sloppy late on, as both teams tired. I liked the Welsh FB (brave, good kick returns, safe under high ball) and left centre (strong, good runner, good hands, tackled well) and some others with ability too. I always feel that way about the Welsh age group teams, raw but there's a lot there for us to work with. We need to find better ways to filter them into SL clubs.

10-10 now

I only saw the last few minutes but going by the commentary they did. The U17s game is very tight, 4-4 at half-time.

Wales 18-34 England

Jamaica isn't a 'fake' international team.

I no longer have a club to support. I've stopped watching the NRL because of their behaviour re the RLWC. And if this ridiculous schedule comes to pass I won't be watching these internationals. I'm not sure that leaves me very many options, and the question continues to be asked; why should I take rugby league seriously when the sport itself refuses to?