The Phantom Horseman

Gadwin Springer also off to Doncaster according to John Davidson. I think Craig Hall has left them now but from memory Doncaster have Luke Briscoe, Jordan Baldwinson, Watson Boas, Sam Smeaton, Tyla Hepi, Brad Knowles, Loui McConnell and Alex Sutcliffe, together with Connor Jones and the rumoured signings of Springer and James Glover, plus the recently-announced Cory Aston and former Fev loanees Luis Johnson and Muiz Mustapha. That's enough for a starting 13 plus 1 bench player. The band's broken up but the tribute act are going strong! Fair play to Doncaster, can't blame them for hoovering up the available talent.

2 knock ons and two penalties conceded inside his own 20m on the first half. Australia, if you decide to take him off at half time and drop him for the 3rd test, we'll understand.

Not square.

Out of interest, are you the same person who has been posting as "Chris Gibbs" on the Blue Wall's Voice Facebook page, who like you says his wife is a licensed insolvency practitioner?

Yeah I wasn't having a go at you, just how things get blown up out of proportion through Chinese whispers etc. But obviously I agree entirely with your point that the players have to make decisions for themselves based on their families etcand what's best for them.

It was one fan, and he wasn't so much slating the players, more clumsy in how he expressed himself. Trouble is one person can say things on social media and it quickly gets repeated without much due regard to how reliable the source is.

I can't help thinking London's backers missed a trick stating that they would be investing even if they were in the Championship in 2026. We'll never know, but I can't help wondering what the outcome of the SL decision procedure would have been if Lockyer & co had indicated they would be withdrawing their funding, all their signings, etc if they weren't selected.

Things can change both ways, it's worth remembering. Anyone who went to Fev's pre-season game at Cas in 2019 when their reserves/academy put 50-odd points past our very makeshift team (Jordan Tansey, Ryan Bailey and lots of triallists from the lower reaches of the Yorkshire Men's league) without breaking sweat would have been hard pressed to see us reaching the Grand Final that year, but that's what happened.

Talking of "Wednesday's court hearing"...it seems we're not even the biggest Yorkshire sports team in trouble, as Sheffield Wednesday have actually filed for administration. Tough times.

Yes, presumably plenty more will be following.

James Glover set to sign for Doncaster according to John Davidson.

Reading between the lines from social media etc and the odd comment from (for instance) Ged Corcoran and Paul Cooke I think there's a lot of uncertainty for the players too, and indeed the coaching staff. I don't think any of them have yet come out and publicly criticised the club for instance (though that might come), but how many we can hang on to, especially amongst the higher-profile/better-paid players, remains to be seen.

Plus the Investec one last year, and one earlier this year that cited Mark Kheirallah and his sponsor as petitioner/supporting creditor. Halifax had two winding-up petitions from HMRC last year and over the last 10 years several other clubs have had the same situation (Whitehaven, Swinton, Oldham etc) whilst Bradford and Widnes both went into administration. As I've said before, there are possibly limits to what the club can say publicly until they have resolved matters with creditors, players, sponsors etc.

I've let it go now, but the last time Dewsbury topped the Championship table and didn't get promoted I threw the toys right out of the pram.

It's a fair point though albeit we are now clearly a million miles from those days. Historically and logically the best indicator of whether or not a club was ready to compete at SL level was whether or ot they were the best team over the course of the previous Championship season, and it's worth remembering that the play-off route to promotion tended to be at the behest of Sky Sports, who don't even cover the Championship play-offs any more. I suspect if York had been thwarted in their bid this year because they had lost the GF you might have been more sympathetic to that view!

It's more like that Christmas day where your Australian relative who realised he didn't have any Christmas presents under the tree opened all yours on Christmas Eve and left them on display.

I wonder if the Aussie owner was told about the 10am embargo?

Sky Sports have a lot to answer for in that regard in my view. It had been either RL or RU forever until Sky decided it was either Rugby (ie union) or Super League.

Yep, I and others went on about it over and over and both factors remain extremely controversial as far as I'm concerned. As I've said many times, it's not an anti-Bradford thing - I've pointed out on numerous occasions that I don't think it's fair that they get no IMG credit for their academy, for instance - but given the stated aim of the Catchment Area was "To maximise growth of the sport in the largest markets to generate new fan bases," it would have been both more fair and more effective to frame those points around actual attendances, with a weighting given to lower-league teams. Wakefield had a much higher average attendance in the Championship (5.5k) than Bradford had and that translated into a SL home average of around 8,000, but the Catchment Area gradings give Bradford 1.5 points compared to 0.5 for Wakefield (and Castleford who also tend to get gates in the 7k+ average most years), at the end of the day that extra point is possibly going to have made the difference between Bradford being promoted or not, but is that IMG grading likely to be justifed by their gates next season? We'll see. There are other issues with the IMG scoring that have arisen with time - the wholly nebulous finance area, for example - but the two I mentioned were obvious from day 1.

Agree 100%with this, there has been a lot of information posted on here lately that is clearly third-hand at best, I'm sure all of it is well-meaning and I don't doubt for a moment that plenty of it is true in terms of our financial situation, it's pretty obvious we're in a grim situation. But there's a danger of people reacting to everything posted on here as if it's confirmed fact when some of it fits under the banner of "I've been reliably informed that...". In particular, it's probably worth repeating the perennial sound advice not to accuse individual people (or make insinuations) of financial malpractice on a public forum unless there's a published judicial verdict that backs that up.

It won't be just for the sake of £120,000. For a start, the wage bill for September and October would probably come to a similar figure, and that's before taking into account other creditors.

Fans are fickle at all levels of the game, but in particular with clubs that have enjoyed a degree of success and then struggle a bit.

Alternatively, one of the "journalists" read people on this forum speculating that Hardman was going to be the coach and published it as "rumoured to be" happening.

Can you expand on this?