nadera78

I had a season ticket up until 18 months ago, and I can't remember the last time I had an email from the club. It was probably the one telling us they couldn't tell us we were moving to Wimbledon - about 3 months after AFCW had announced it. I also notice that the man most likely responsible for this latest, and probably final, attempt to alienate everyone connected to the club hasn't been seen posting on the fans' forum for a long while now.

This should be a sad day for me, because I really like Danny Ward and the Broncos have been a big part of my life for almost 28 years now. Unfortunately, it's been met with a bit of a shrug. It's been coming for a long time. Good luck to Danny and his family, they've all contributed to the club and the game in London. What is there new to say about the club itself? Not a lot, to be honest. Hughes has put an astronomical sum of money into the Broncos, but at the same time is almost entirely to blame for the club's fanbase collapsing from a 4,000 average when he took over to less than 10% of that now. If and when he does walk away - which looks more likely than ever - then that's probably it for the club. No-one else is coming in to take it over. And even then Hughes is once again to blame. The Supporters Trust was set up to help out with small things in the present, and to raise a few quid for the academy, but with one eye on the future and potential days like this one. Contingency planning, I guess you could call it. Unfortunately, the club has done everything it can to strangle the Trust - from ignoring it entirely through to actively sabotaging it with its new "Official" supporters club. If it had been allowed (god-forbid even encouraged) to grow then perhaps it might now be in a position to take over, or at least do so alongside some other investors, but I doubt the Trust is in any kind of shape to take on that commitment.

Every day for weeks if not months, friends of Kevin Walters were on the television, radio and papers calling for Seibold to be sacked and stating in definite terms that there was only one man who could turn the broncos around. Every day. If you can't see that it was orchestrated then I can't help you. It was obvious to everyone outside of the club that the entire organisation was in a mess, simply changing coaches wasn't going to fix anything, but a damaged club being run by weak people got spooked by the results and the media onslaught and acted in a way that made the situation worse. The fact Walters was overlooked for the job twice previously simply emphasises that he isn't good enough. He's never been good enough, even if he is "doing the best he can".

I don't feel sorry for him in the slightest. He got his mates in the media to relentlessly attack Seibold in order to open the position up for him, and then to put him forward as the only option for the job. It was a naked and unscrupulous manoeuvre, and it got him what he wanted. Now the broncos are discovering what most of the sport has known for a long time: he's not a very good coach.

Essentially both the RFL and the clubs have decided they do not want to enforce any real standards in the professional game. Neither of them can afford it, nor do they want the hassle or the inevitable friction that would result. Far better simply to ignore everything until an unfortunate incident of some kind forces their hand.

As opposed to all the unsustainable clubs with poor owners.

No, what's concerning is that when I read "22 years ago" my immediate thought was 1980-something.

Surprised to see Lloyd White included on that list. Wonder why he's switching from Wales?

As disappointing as it is to lose yet another of our few recognised faces, I don't get what the issue is here. The sport in England has made its direction of travel clear, and people with ambition will always seek more than it is willing and able to offer. I'd have thought everyone had recognised that by now.

The mid-season international fixtures are a relatively new thing. The NRL started them as a way of padding out the weeks when Origin was taking place and there were no NRL fixtures, so they had more games to include in their broadcast packages. They had total control over them. Which was fine for a while, until they realised that having them on at the same time as their showpiece event emphasised how many players preferred to play international RL if forced to choose and so they hurriedly dumped the competing fixtures. Nothing can be allowed to get in the way of Origin. The various NGBs don't have the resources to organise events like this, and besides, from their perspective what would be the point in forcing Jarome Luai, etc to choose between a NSW jersey and a Samoan one?

Might well be playing for PNG in the World Cup later this year, he is apparently eligible and the Kangaroos won't go near him.

As others have said, as usual it looksIt looks like a cheap, knock off 'England' shirt. The full playing kit, with the dozen different sponsors, looks even worse. Smacks of a real low end sport that can't find a decent sponsor so sells patches to anyone it can, which is bad enough at club level but is a terrible look for a national team. It also makes the kit look worse because it ruins any semblance of design. The idea that we can't use a chevron because St Helens do is ludicrous. The FA have no problem using the same basic colour scheme is Tottenham, Preston, Bolton and possibly others. You'd get 5 blokes in Wigan refusing to buy one and that's about it. Throw a tiny bit of blue piping around the edges of the chevron if you really feel the need to distinguish it, lots of English national teams use blue. This really shouldn't be so difficult and yet we continually end up looking cheap.

There you go again, unable to respond to points people have made in this thread without throwing in person comments. Have fun with that. Hope it works out for you. Onto the ignore list you go.

Your inability to engage on this thread without taking cheap shots at me - and as far as I know we've never interacted before, or if we have it was not memorable - is really quite sad.

The North East RL has around 130 kids playing at U16s - which appears to be comparable to Hull. And yet some would have us believe there is sufficient playing talent to justify two academies in the latter.

Exactly right, it is a perfect snap shot of rugby league. The RFL have spent three years on this process - from talking to clubs at every level of the game from community upwards, to designing the evaluation, to bringing in outside experts in elite athlete development from Sports England, to reviewing the applications, and finally awarding 10 of the 12 licences available. And then, because of the reaction from a handful of people who don't understand what's going on (or refuse to engage beyond wailing and stamping their feet) they've ignored all of that work and reversed course.

You can play for a Tier 2 nation and still play Origin (assuming you were born in NSW/Qld, or moved there before turning 13). That's why Luai, etc will do both. Taumalolo is ineligible on two grounds: he moved to Australia aged 13, so missed the cut off, and because he already played for New Zealand (Tier 1) before switching to Tonga (who remain Tier 2).

This is broadly what Salford have done over the past few years, certainly since Koukash left. They have a Category 3 Academy which has produced a couple of players, but by and large they recruit from SL, NRL and Championship clubs. Occasionally they sell one to a rival team, more often they lose them when out of contract, but they go back to the well and find new players. The salary cap probably helps in this, in that decent players (but not stars) move around the league to earn a better wage from lower ranked clubs than they would get at one of the big six.

I had no idea my posts aroused such interest over a prolonged period of time. You still refuse to engage in the central point; if you only have 100 16 year olds to work with you're only going to get 1 or 2 SL players. 90 of them won't have anything like the combination of attributes needed to play elite sport, a handful will be close to it but not quite there for a variety of reasons, and the top 1 or 2 will establish themselves and have good careers. You can put the best 25 of them through 1 academy or you can put all 100 through 4 academies, it won't change the basic numbers. You've got it the wrong way round, we need to get more kids playing the game and then look at increasing the number of academies.

I'll ignore your condescending last comment. The problem is you're combining two different things - getting more kids playing the game, and turning the players we have got into elite athletes. If you only have 100 16 year olds playing RL then you're only going to get 1 or 2 SL players out of them, anything beyond that is not realistic. If you have 500 16 year olds playing RL in Hull then you might be in a position to look again at a second academy - and that is where the clubs (all clubs) need to be spending their time, getting more kids playing RL in the first place. A 10-year old doesn't start playing RL because X team has an academy, he has no knowledge or interest in the game's elite development structure, he does it because someone (a parent, teacher, friend, club/RFL development officer) introduces him to the game. We need more of those before we can have more academies. Just by way of contrast, Penrith District RL (the biggest junior district in NSW) has 10,000 registered juniors. That's where we are really behind the Aussies.

There is no strategic gain from having 2 academies cannibalising one another. And it is part of the RFLs job to set that strategy.

Putting aside the impact on the community game (the cause/effect of which is a separate debate) and just looking at how we produce elite athletes. When the Hull clubs had a combined academy it was said that there were around 100 players in U16s across the whole city. Taking that as a starting point; out of 100 players you could reasonably expect 1 or 2 of them to have full SL careers, and perhaps 4 or 5 in the Championship/League 1 (and even that number feels high compared to other sports, simply because of our low participation figures and the need to fill 14 full-time and 22 part-time squads). We could have 4 academies in Hull and, with only 100 U16s, it still wouldn't change the number of players produced simply because the other players won't be good enough to play in SL. There's no shame in that, most of us aren't good enough to do the things we dreamed of as kids, that's why it's called 'elite', but there's also no escaping it. Even if we assumed the number of U16s in Hull has doubled to 200, that still wouldn't justify having more than 1 academy. It's a numbers game, simple as that. Frankly, having more than 1 academy in Hull would be a ludicrous waste of resources - players, coaches, man hours, finance - especially for a sport that is permanently short of them. I know that sounds cold, but we're not talking about participation, we're talking about producing elite athletes.

Bowl design? Low metallic roofs? 3/4 of the stadium consists of temporary stands. You've got your wish, for the Broncos to finance your football club, so you can stop acting as a fluffer now.

Agreed. I'm a long way from club these days, physically and emotionally, but I can't help feeling it's on its last legs. The academy is the only thing it does well, as the northern clubs who like to sign our players can attest, but that will end up going too.

As usual, the lack of professionalism from people working in RL is notable in the responses to this decision. We've quickly covered the usual: it's a disgrace, my club's proposal was world-beating, the game's dead, the expansion clubs are to blame, the RFL are corrupt. Frankly, some of the people in this sport would struggle to find employment if they hadn't moved directly from the playing field to the club office.