Dave T

I always find this odd. I never played basketball outside of school, and have never heard of anyone i know playing basketball at adult or youth level. I have heard of and/or know people who play most other sports, but basketball always does well in these studies.

When he returned from i jury I thought he went well at Wire tbh, he seemed to regain some form. Of course he still has a tendency for a poor play or two each match, sometimes at key moments!

When you refer to people's opinions as novice and then come up a post like this I have to chuckle.

One of the things that I do find is a bit of a challenge for RL (on top of the other points already discussed) is that I think the passion and loyalty of the fanbase and media can be a strength, but I do also think it can quite quickly turn toxic, and if I'm honest, I find some of that comes from the Northern roots where we can often be harsh, self-deprecating, and have a habit of 'telling it as it is'. I'm not sure that always creates a positive and welcoming environment for people to come into the game. A couple of instances here - and my examples are not meant as endorsements of the sponsorship deals in question. 1 - We know there are challenges around gambling sponsorship, so the leaders decided to take an alternative approach and turn down the betting company deal. The Stobart deal was born and offered something different, some visibility, but we gave away much less - the assets were broken down and the intent was to sell more various assets across the piece. Clearly it wasn't a brilliant deal, but it did show a leadership team that was attempting to shift from problem areas, and shift into a more modern area of sponsorship deals - however they were playing with a weak hand, and the offer was zero cash. A key issue here is that despite the clubs agreeing to this and buying into it (and taking the hit on the £30-50k per year - pretty minimal really), the media and fans were queueing up to mock and bash the deal. It quite quickly became unsustainable and toxic. I don't think that would have helped sell ancillary sponsorships under that model, and can't help future negotiations when your title sponsor deal has been so battered by the fans and media. 2 - Papa Johns is another perfect example of the above. A perfectly reasonable deal that provided some food for some visibility in the grounds. The kind of deal that can be built upon if a success and you woo them as a full on partner. The fans, media, and then even the players mocked this one to death. Papa Johns were last seen sponsoring football and Rugby Union. 3 - We have numerous other examples - even in this thread Mushy Peas have been mocked numerous times, despite not even being a partner any more. Betfred get stick regularly. I do think there is a real toxicity at times in RL and we need to be really careful.

Sort of, Australia at St Helens got half the crowd they did in Coventry. That's pretty shocking.

Aye, I don't think we were disagreeing, just adding more to the point on numbers.

To an extent that's true and there are clearly numbers at play, but there is also brand, prestige, history, perception and loyalty and other softer measures that are important too. And then we have other logical factors like geography and scheduling at play. I don't feel like the game takes the whole picture seriously, and just stages some games and hopes some sponsors decide they like it.

Can't disagree on Davidson. But I would say that there is a hell of a lot of criticism of these sports by their own too. I think we maybe take the criticism more personally in RL because we are under achieving and vulnerable. When Union pundits are critical, as a fan you can enjoy it and relax knowing there are 80k in London, 70k in Cardiff, 68k in Edinburgh and 50k in Dublin. We take it harder when we know we have 15k in Wigan and 300 in Gateshead. I don't think we aren't selling because of people telling people RL is no good.

Quite simply, the demand isn't there. And there are likely to be plenty reasons for that, but I think we have a major issue in being squeezed out of the market. If you have a modest budget nowadays that youve decided to spend in sport, you probably have more options than ever with the emergence of women's sport for example. I agree we are under performing, even against where we should be, but we are miles off what the potential is, and that will take a huge shift.

That's fair, but we also don't need to be too insecure that somebody grumbling about one match becomes something we still talk about months later. I have no time for Wilkin's opinions and try and forget about them instantly tbh!

What does that actually mean? Who is telling people it's poop? Sky aren't, SL aren't, IMG aren't, the clubs aren't. Well, actually, the odd owner here and there does.

Yeah, that's part of the 'product' point - facilities and event feel are a huge part of that, and there has never been an event staged at Halliwell Jones or similar that has a value of £70 for a seat. I'm a huge international sport fan, but these events were lesser than a standard SL game in the same grounds.

There is also the really quite simple point on the RLWC that the prices were quite simply a rip off. They were charging prices that weren't the market value for an RL event at any level. We can add a premium for a WC factor, but you really can't just take an event that you normally sell for £15-20 and stick a £70 price tag on it. It doesn't work, and it didn't work. Value and perception is important here. I've spent a fortune on music gigs, and have just spent £220 to watch a theatre show in a few weeks for 3 of us, but I understand that's the market rate for these events. Dutton and his team arrogantly stuck a hefty price tag on the WC tickets after years of selling internationals at bargain prices and then appeared surprised when they played in front of empty grounds. They treated people like idiots. So I agree, we have too small a pool in the first place, but a big issue is we don't even serve the current pool well. We can't just fixing things by believing more, or having more faith in RL. We have to make the product better (and I don't mean shot clocks or 7 tackle sets).

Probably the bigger worry is that i expect many more than that are no more than a modest shock event away from being in severe financial trouble.

It's probably not too easy to describe the tournament as loss making, although as usual there appears to be a lack of transparency, making it difficult to piece it all together. If £3m+ was paid to IRL for a hosting fee then it's potentially a decent result, although there are maybe challenges if the RFL are expected to underwrite the recent losses. It's also hard to piece together how much of the costs were covered by the government funding and grants.

I think this is an important point to note. The system should really keep financially vulnerable clubs as a Grade B as you are likely to score poorly on the finance pillar. Add to that, that if you have an insolvency event, you are then downgraded, so would be a Grade C and therefore relegated as a Grade C is not eligible for Super League. So when people are asking for the system to take into consideration the financial performance - it does. What they are really asking for is the bar to be lower. That's fine, but people need to be clear that there are points available, and there is a consequence of administration. I would say that we really do need to be careful about wanting that bar to be too low, as it may be pretty ugly for the game if we start to relegate teams every time they experience a cash flow issue.

Nah. This isn't just a free loan so they can avoid paying the bank interest.

I suppose we need to be clear about what that's achieving though. I've only been casually following this story, but I don't think there is any doubt that Salford have somewhere to play is there? There may be bits of paper missing right now because of legalities around ownership, but I don't think any advance of money is to resolve a lack of stadium to play in. I think that point is a red herring and not particularly relevant here. Lack of money is. They could have an agreement to play games but it ain't fixing that cash issue.

I think a decent sense check here is to look at the clubs immediately below Salford in the rankings. This isn't a case of Salford being a basket case and there being a load of strong clubs forming a queue to take their slot. These are challenging times, we are seeing clubs struggle all the time, more will happen soon I expect. We've seen over the years how quickly things can turn South, so tbh, if we were going to have a real, genuine financial sustainability metric, I expect nobody would score well at all. If that was used as a way of excluding teams, we may not have a league.

"The underlying loss made in 2022 in the year of the tournament has meant that RLWC2021 Ltd is unable to meet itsmost significant remaining creditor, International Rugby League. RLWC2021 Ltd has committed to IRL to make payments against the outstanding rights fee as and when RLWC2021 receives the amounts it is owed by the competing nations" That sort of raises more questions than it answers!

But that isn't true. It is a flawed starting position that means that every decision that comes off the back of it is flawed.

Not exactly a blockbuster weekend, but I suppose they feel they can get good crowds for openers irrespective of the match-ups.

I'm happy to agree to disagree on the principle of the thing, because that's where we disagree here, I agree with some of your points on certain incidents and disagree with others, but I fundamentally disagree with your underlying point that ultimately they can justify whatever they do as they are just protecting their club comp. That isn't how things generally work. It's a really insular mentality. And your last point really does actually highlight why the NRL shouldn't be controlling the international game, because as you say, their remit is to put their club comp first above all else. This is why sports have a model of a World governing body. And you may feel sabotage is over the top, but there is plenty of evidence of them undermining the IRL, tournaments, series, events - and I don't think that's for sh**s and giggles, it's so they can wrestle control and only do exactly what they want and everyone has to fall in line. And that is an outcome of the mentality you describe. NRL club game at all costs, whilst ticking the international box. 3 Kangaroos games a year, no more years of up to 7 or 8. That's not what the NRL clubs want.

Why are the NRL organising these and not supporting the original plan of the IRL staging 6N tournaments.

Instead of shuddering to think where we'd be without the NRL, I tend to think where we'd be if we had a genuinely supportive cash-rich partner who wanted to deliver genuine growth internationally instead of one that takes a year off every few years, one that changes their mind frequently (Ashes in 2019 and 2024), cancels successful events, sabotages Tests between other nations and even cancels whole World Cups. With friends like these....