Big Picture

It was a paying contract for them, and realistically it paid the French market value of a league where most of the visiting teams are in places unknown to the French public and when they go to France to play they play in a small town which is likely also unknown to the bulk of the French public.

What? You want the guy who screwed up the deal which Catalans had with BeIN Sports to handle negotiations and lead the commercial and marketing part of things??? Oh vey!

I remember seeing it suggested seriously by various posters in those threads.

Yet when how to accommodate more foreign teams in SL has been discussed in past threads that very same model (in the form of a Heartland division and "the rest" division has been treated seriously!

I know they didn't use metres back then, but when they switched to metric the stadiums which I mentioned (which unless I'm mistaken were the original home stadiums used by those teams) were all able to accommodate 100 metre fields of play whereas that was difficult at Odsal. Without the sort of lines which the game has now, how do you know how long the fields of play were at those other stadiums? Can you support your claim that 100 yards was full length under the old rules with something other than anecdotal information? It does fly in the face of the fact that 110 yards was full length in RU before it went metric and Canadian rugby football inherited the same limit from that source, so it would have been natural for RL also to have inherited 110 yards from the same source. The 1989 World Club Challenge between Widnes and Canberra was played before they went metric (in the UK at least), the video clearly shows three equidistant lines between the centre line and the 25 yard lines which are clearly ten yards apart because the lines closest to the centre line intersect the soccer centre circle which as we all know has a radius of 10 yards, thus the full length was 110 yards. You can clearly see that here:

That one could be called the Mud Bowl!

Club colours in an alternate arrangement, just as is done in Australia and in all major North American sports. Why any of their fans would pay for jerseys in some other colours is utterly beyond me.

Ohmigod what a dreamer the guy is. A top pro league in Spain of all countries, and with a bottom-up strategy rather than a top-down strategy no less! ROFLMAO!!

Got them all in the end, but I had to rack my brain to get the last couple. Counting one country twice under two variants of its name is sneaky!

It did before the 10-metre rule came in though. The 25 yard line became the 22 metre line then, then when the 10-metre rule came in it became the 20 metre line.

I enjoyed your piece relating the Wolfpack's capture of Sonny Bill Williams to the RU converts who came into the game in the past. It's a shame that absent a lot more money in RL than is the case now, SBW will probably be the last such convert who comes over.

It was needed, desperately in fact. In that report Featherstone's chairman said straight out that 26 of the 32 pro clubs were insolvent.

There's no reason we can't have both, if bringing the former about is handled by a separate organization which is outside the one which runs the traditional domestic game in Britain and the two look after their own areas of operation separately.

Ah I understand now, you're basing your view on Odsal Stadium and its dimensions. Odsal however had a shorter field than other long time venues like Central Park, The Boulevard, Belle Vue, Thrum Hall, The Boulevard, Headingley and others which could all accommodate 100 metres without any issue, so it's hardly definitive.

Those expectations were unrealistic without serious change of the sort proposed which was so controversial. Expectations of that sort could never be met by a league dominated by small time traditional away fan-dependent clubs, they could only be met by something wholly new and separate from them and their small time ways.