keighley

I recall that era and, as I remember, Swinton were RL Champions two years in a row and pulled in 5 to 6,000 fans. This would seem to be better than Salford are currently managing. Are you then saying Salford have no potential because they cannot yet get more than Swinton did.? Bradford were champions in the Peter Fox era but barely got 6,000 to watch them. Do you deny they have potential.? What were Catalans pulling in in the French leagues prior to their SL entry. Not much but people could see and realise their potential and we have what we have now as a result. If you want to go back in history, when Swinton won all four cups and built a huge 30,000 seat stadium to accommodate their crowds, then I would argue that that demonstrates the potential of the area. Everybody agrees London has potential and they have never averaged 6,000. As I keep saying potential is what could be not was is or was. It's a matter of opinion, but, under the right circumstances, I believe Swinton have potential.

ll those large European cities you list do have potential.As with my examples, that's all ghey have, potential and less scope for it happening than the UK examples. I hope you noticed Skolars was on my list ( Last time I looked they were in London). Everton are a tiny suburb of Livrpool. Swinton is a suburb of an even bigger city, Manchester, and I think I read a story about Dr Khoukash wanting to buy them and develop a stadium/retail park in Swinton centre. I call that potential whether it happens is of course a moot point. I think some people should look at the definition of potential as opposed to probable or certain.

Potential to me means what is possible, not what is or what was. All of he clubs in the list have, in my opinion potential. They are all in big population centres, vital as alleged by some for a SL team9 Swinton being a part of Salford/Manchester). Most all of them have some culture of RL already in place with varying degrees of success. Some have ready made stadia ( Doncaster, Gateshead, ) Some have stadia supposedly to be built, (York) Some have had decent successs in the past Sheffield and Gateshead ( they finished in the top eight, pulled in 3,000 plus crowds and thet did it without Sky money) Gloucester is a Rugby area, albeit union and have a unique new concept in the University link uo and a serious entrepreneur in Lionel Hirst. Ti me they all have potential to make it. However, as I did say, realising that potential is another thing entirely.

Swinton, Sheffield, Doncaster, York, Oldham Gateshead, Gloucester, Skolars, Crusaders all have huge potential. Whether any of it can be realised is another matter entirely.

No rule is broken when a drip of water for a thousand years wears away the hardest granite.

I think you are right that Hull would be reluctant to allow those players to threaten their club by their performances for Doncaster. This leaves the ball in Doncaster's court. They must try and raise the cash to sign these players on a permanent basis so that Hull cannot derail their challenge in that way. This is what must happen at he championship clubs. They must up their game if they want to compete.

That skews the aggregate comparison then but the average of 5,515 is still the worst since 1986/87 when it was 4,844. In 1988/89 for instance the average was 7,292. Perhaps that season should have been used as a comparison

With regards to post 59 on the locked 'Back to the future" thread, where I alleged that the last season of DIv 1 prior to SL was the worst for many years as regards attendances and I was challenged on the accuracy of that. I Googled on the subject and a chart by that excellent statistician Padge came up. According to Padge from 1976 to 1993/94 1976 was the worst season with 900,000 aggregate spectators for Div 1 and the best was 1993/94 with 1,280,000m aggregate spectators for Div 1. In 1994/95 the last winter season and, as I stated a dead rubber season waiting for SL to start, the aggregate was 600,000 spectators at Div 1 games. This was clearly the worst season for many years and to use it as a comparison with SL attendances to demonstrate a huge increase is disingenuous. Just saying.

This reduction in crowds would suggest that SL has been a miserable failure. Lies, damn lies etc. Wakefield and Castleford have been in SL all those years. Isn't part of the remit to develop and assist he junior base. Didn't you laud the number of players the Calder region produced on another thread as being just behind Wigan and Leeds. This was when you were pushing your amalgamation theory of a massive Calder entity to challenge the big boys. You can't have it both ways. Does the Calder area produce players it does it not. I guess it depends which way your weather vane is turning on any particular day. The new structure is not in place yet. Jockeying for position is what's happening and it's two weeks into the season. It's too small a sample to determine if attendances are down or not. There are other factors at work in your sample example such as Wakefield having just escaped bankruptcy, having sold many players and operating on a health and safety crowd restriction. Castleford were at home to Catalan, a notoriously poor draw with Northern fans. Castleford finished in the bottom three last year. A few wins and the Castleford crowds will increase. Winning does have that effect. Featherstone's crowd was excellent. I don't see what your beef is there at all. If the lower crowd figures transalate to the full season ahead, you might have a point. At present you don't.

Fev got 2,500. Is that well down ? Cas were playing Catalans, no away support and not a big draw, Now cas are top of the league, expect a much bigger crowd at their next home game. Halifax are in the championship. Bradford are in the bottom two with two bankruptcies in two years. Is it any surprise the aggregate attendance is down. Now if Bradford were stable and in the top eight I would expect 10,000 and if Halifax were in SL I would expect 4,000. This would give you 21,000. The lost fans would be from Bradford, whose 15,000 average is not likely ever to return. That era was a one off. Statistics are only good if you don't totally skew the numbers and circumstances just to make them prove a point.

If your hopes for SL were to be transported to the NRL, Brisbane and the Warriors and Canberra would be ditched to seek a slimmed down mini league compressed into Sydney. There would be no room for a Perth team or the Melbourne Storm because those areas don't produce players. There would be no room for a second team in Brisbane because two team cities strangle and dilute the spectator base and thin the playing talent pool. Fortunately for the game of Rugby League, your view does not prevail and the NRL is and has not been ring fenced and will expand and grow the game in the years to come.

Completely defeatist like an ostrich or a tortoise. In the face of risk, stick your head in the sand, pull back into your shell and retreat. Forget the several players in SL from London, from Wales, from Cumbria, Batley, Dewsbury. Forget that there are teams in Cheltenham, Oxford, Hemel in the pro game finding new sources of players as we speak and forget the spread of the amateur game in the midlands, Coventry, Leicester, Nottingham, Telford and Derbyshire. Forget the thriving North East amateur scene. Forget the renaissance at Leigh and Fev, Halifax and Crusaders. Forget that Castleford are top of the league and Dewsbury and Doncaster are in the top four. There are just no players to be found to have decent teams in anywhere but ring around the roses ring fenced nirvana land. The system is producing players at various levels and SL players will eventually surface. Forget that this game is a game for small to medium sized clubs. There are no soccer sized behemoths in our game. This is a game of medium sized at best and ambition, drive and energy can still get small to the top. Long may it continue. We need more Winston Churchills and fewer Neville Chamberlains in the face of danger from RU and other monsters. Those who dare win, I think I heard somewhere.

Last time I looked there were two teams in London, two in Wales and one in France with plans in hand to give Toulouse a Championship place. There have been plans to give Coventry a CC1 place for a couple of years. With p and r, sort of, scheduled to return, all these teams can theoretically make SL.

That's just so ambitious. A whole sport of just 10 northern teams, ring fenced forever. That should really appeal to Sky who want to sell dishes throughout England. It should really expand the fan base to astronomical proportions and should produce a wide variety of interesting fixtures of wide geographical spread. It should also encourage entrepreneurs to put their money into the game, the only question is where would they invest since there are only ten teams and they will already have their money men in place. London will be gone, any chance of Wales or the midlands will be gone, France will be gone. That is so forward looking and full of optimism for the games future, I don't know why we havn't done it years ago. A 10 team sport. What a great idea ? Small and irrelevant is the way to the future.

Two SL teams who have learned the folly of manipulating attendances via cheap season tickets and have now raised them again versus two Championship teams. Doesn't seem like a fair comparison.

Looking at Fridays result, the Huddersfield model looks more likely to win the whole enchilada than the self sustaining Wigan operation. There is more than one way to skin a cat.

So to see if Fev can hack it or not, the other variables have to be added such as, stadium ownership and revenue, investor contributions, club lotteries, marketing inititiatives. As we can see from the Bradford scenario, crowds alone are not the barometer by which to measure success.

London, Sheffield, Manchester urban area do not support that pronouncement although it would generally hold true, variables change the equation.

Sport is indeed about winners and losers. You seem to want the current winners to remain the current winners into the foreseeable future and have no time for the list of winners to change. If your approach was to be the norm and we were in the 1960's, you would be in favour of retaining Swinton in SL/1st Division because they are a big team ( Champions, big round, decent crowds ). Clearly Swinton crashed and burned because they didn't do the work necessary to remain at the top but your approach would have had then ring fenced because they were big in that present. You are taking the same approach now in your defence of the Bulls. You picked a moment in time when they were top dogs and want them retained at the top for ever because of that success. Salford and Huddersfield and Widnes have improved for the cellar to the top level but because they were not elite at the time Bradford and Leeds and Wigan were, in your slice of time that set the makeup of SL for all time they are not big clubs and are in a false position because they have investors. Oh please. Winners change and losers become loser and vice versa. We need real and r to enable this natural evolution of winners and losers to take place easier.

This is from a RL genius from his playing days to his coaching and administration days. As we several of us at least, have deduced, Aston backs up our thoughts that this 3 x 8 is a fraud and so stacked against Championship sides, that a team actually getting promotion will be as rare as a dodo egg. What is the thought process from those making the decisions to introduce such a doomed format. ? Go knows I support p and r but this is going to be worse than licencing. Not only does it keep the top CC clubs from promotion but it further weakens the CC by creating a permanent top four at that level and marginalsing the rest but not funding them equally. More money to the top four, what the hell is that about ? It will make reaching the 3 x 8 academic and leave the other 8 or ten playing for nothing. His point on the academies is also illuminating. There is going to be a severe shortage of players soon and just reducing the number of SL clubs to divvy up the pie in bigger pieces will not solve that. Just as the game should be on the crest of a wave of success after the World Cup and the Sky deal, it shoots itself in the foot.

yes it's loaded. It's a load of rubbish. Another scenario is that Sheffield again win a playoff place, actually do win a promotion spot but are then turned down on standards. When this format has been in place for several seasons and no CC club has come within a smell of promotion and the public therefore completely tires of it and votes with their feet, what then. If they are to have p and r, have p and r, not some loaded half assed system which will not result in any promotion and with loaded deck finances to even further discriminate against likely threats from below. I cannot believe that a ten team league with one fifth from a foreign country, unchanging and unchangeable for the foreseeable future is the way forward for a sport that wants to expand and grow. It's not beyond the realms of possibility, with BT still lurking out there, that this one sided mess will provoke a breakaway and split the game asunder.

If I remember rightly, Featherstone had the grand final all but won when Trinity staged a miraculous comeback. That's what I meant by sneaked. I have admiration for your club. The point I was making was that a poster was putting them in the "big" club column and these events in the 2nd div and limping along at the bottom end of SL do not support that viewpoint.

Fair comment.

The top Aussie RU players are all ex RL players. They have no RU produced players who could get into the NRL on merit. England RU are in the same boat. RU has some top people running their game no doubt but recent developments in RL from the WC to the new Sky TV deal suggest that we have some half decent administrators ourselves.

It's a close call. Both codes have only one top level club in London with Harlequins being more successful than the Broncos