The Phantom Horseman

actually posted this here in error (I meant to post it in the General forum, which I've done now) but might as well leave it here too now.

One of the frustrating things if you follow the Championship, or League 1, is the difficulty in finding out exactly what funding each club gets. It's been like this for years, we kind of knew a few years ago in the Middle 8s era that there were some huge sums being handed out to teams that finished at the top of the Championship but it was really hard to pin down the exact figures for each finishing position because they were never published on any offical website and we were left to rely on piecemeal comments from journalists. Fast forward to 2022/23 and I've picked up a couple of comments by Mick Gledhill about funding for the lower league clubs. I know most people's first reaction will be to roll their eyes at the source but that's precisely my point, why would we need to rely on the words of someone who may be hit-and-miss if the information were published by the RFL? Anyway, at one point Gledhill was talking about the different amounts received by clubs based on the various"Return On Investment" criteria. As I understand it from things I've read written by journalists, there is still a sliding scale of payments based on finishing position, but with a much smaller difference between positions than used to be the case. However, Gledhill has stated that the difference in payments based on crowds and data (social media engagements etc) is more significant than I would have guessed - he cited a range of £45k down to £6k for each of those two categories. That's pretty significant, especially when some of those figures might be a bit nebulous and even possible to "game". He has said on more than one occasion that Bradford topped the payouts for crowds (Widnes were second, apparently). I presume that's based on season ticket sales, as the actual attendances at Odsal last year were often pitiful - there was one game for instance where Bradford announced a crowd of 2,700 but photographic evidence from all parts of the ground strongly suggested the crowd fell well short of four figures. So presumably it's based on season ticket sales, which isn't unusual (I think plenty of clubs include season tickets amongst the announced gates), but you wonder how that and all the other factors that have a direct impact on funding are monitored. But more importantly, why can't the figures just be published, telling us who received how much in each category? Instead we get speculative comments about how team A is much better funded than team B, but if we had the information published, there wouldn't be any need for speculating or hanging on for titbits from what may or may not be unreliable sources.

One of the frustrating things if you follow the Championship, or League 1, is the difficulty in finding out exactly what funding each club gets. It's been like this for years, we kind of knew a few years ago in the Middle 8s era that there were some huge sums being handed out to teams that finished at the top of the Championship but it was really hard to pin down the exact figures for each finishing position because they were never published on any offical website and we were left to rely on piecemeal comments from journalists. Fast forward to 2022/23 and I've picked up a couple of comments by Mick Gledhill about funding for the lower league clubs. I know most people's first reaction will be to roll their eyes at the source but that's precisely my point, why would we need to rely on the words of someone who may be hit-and-miss if the information were published by the RFL? Anyway, at one point Gledhill was talking about the different amounts received by clubs based on the various"Return On Investment" criteria. As I understand it from things I've read written by journalists, there is still a sliding scale of payments based on finishing position, but with a much smaller difference between positions than used to be the case. However, Gledhill has stated that the difference in payments based on crowds and data (social media engagements etc) is more significant than I would have guessed - he cited a range of £45k down to £6k for each of those two categories. That's pretty significant, especially when some of those figures might be a bit nebulous and even possible to "game". He has said on more than one occasion that Bradford topped the payouts for crowds (Widnes were second, apparently). I presume that's based on season ticket sales, as the actual attendances at Odsal last year were often pitiful - there was one game for instance where Bradford announced a crowd of 2,700 but photographic evidence from all parts of the ground strongly suggested the crowd fell well short of four figures. So presumably it's based on season ticket sales, which isn't unusual (I think plenty of clubs include season tickets amongst the announced gates), but you wonder how that and all the other factors that have a direct impact on funding are monitored. But more importantly, why can't the figures just be published, telling us who received how much in each category? Instead we get speculative comments about how team A is much better funded than team B, but if we had the information published, there wouldn't be any need for speculating or hanging on for titbits from what may or may not be unreliable sources.

Just when I thought I'd set this one up beautifully for a SARL "exclusive"...

Hope not, or Halifax might be struggling at the full back position.

The rumoured signing of Andrew Bulman for Barrow has been confirmed this morning, 19 days after Whitehaven announced via their Facebook page that he had "asked for a release from his contract as he had fallen out of love with rugby and wanted to pursue opportunities away from the game"

Indeed. I was listening to MarkLasPalmas of this parish in his analyst role in the Cas game commentary on RoversTV (where he was very good btw I reckoned) and he mentioned Luke Cooper who despite probably not being in most people's first 17 when everyone is fit, played 25 games last year, it's rare a team has a charmed life with injuries especially amongst the forwards.

I've tried a couple of times to come up with what I'd have as my preferred 17 from our squad and every time I have to leave out at least two players that I really want to include. Amongst our forwards, in particular, I don't think there's much between about eight of them.

Apparently I've got this all wrong according to the latest League Express/TotalRL offering, which assures us that "the club has been impressive on and off the field in recent seasons". Nothing against Bradford and as I said in the positive part of my write-up they have made some eyecatching signings this off-season and might well improve considerably, but I can't imagine even the most fervent Bulls fan agrees with that?

Rovers social media have announced that Mackenzie is on a flight on his way to Featherstone today.

A lot are, though to me it seems fewer have been pre-empted in recent months. At Fev for instance, of the 9 new signings, I think only one was "broken" by the "media". That was Kyle Evans on New Year's Day, when Fev stated on their SM channels at 12.48pm that they would announce a new signing at 2pm, but Mick Gledhill, who runs a weekly podcast with the SMTMUK team (who I think are Evans' agents), broke the news on Twitter at 1.11pm. Generally though I agree if you mean those signings are pre-empted via journalists, as it seems logical that agents are the source of most of their info.

Yes, that was the first thing that came to my mind too. Far easier to defend a differential penalty 10m from your own line with 13 players spread across the park than with 6 in the scrum - as proven by the fact that the attacking team tended to opt for the scrum to be re-set rather than accept the penalty.

It's a bit sad too, though isn't it? Until a couple of years ago most big RL transfer news stories were broken in League Express. If you'd said then that they'd quickly become engaged in a race-to-the-bottom with SARL nobody would have believed it. Trouble is they know the more daft stuff they churn out, the more we're going to talk about it, they know what they're doing (and no I'm not linking to SARL's latest incisive piece, promoted by the tweet "Are Bradford the favourites for SL promotion").

It's good to see the widely-cited view that Bradford are going to be more professional this season, but I'm not sure it's Mark Dunning's place to reveal that Joe Arundel got a payout from Halifax, as he has in an interview published by BullsTV today?

No surprise but no further action for Hardcastle's sin binning (or anything else in the game). The fact that the allegations for Hardy and the Cas player involved were "pushing" suggests the yellow cards might have been an over-reaction by the ref.

To me this is miles wide of the mark. I've seen plenty of posts on social media suggesting Joey was "lazy" or "disinterested" but if it's a straight comparison with Hall in that respect, Joey had far more carries than Hall when they both played. He made the odd error of judgement in defence, but I dread to think what the reaction had been if he had defended like Hall did on some occasions - check out Woodburn-Hall's 2nd try (in the 2nd half) away at Halifax (and Matty Wildie's reaction to Hall's effort), or for Spedding's 1st try at Widnes. Don't get me wrong, I have loved what Hall has done at Fev overall and he might still be a big contributor for us this year. And if people think Leilua wasn't as good as they'd hoped he would be, that's fair enough. I just don't like it when players seem to be held to different levels of accountability.

I think the chances of Lockwood featuring regularly shouldn't be discounted. Long knows him from his previous stint here (was it Long's arrival that brought about the extra year for Locky?) and was fulsome in his praise after the Cas game..."Locky was outstanding, he set the tone of the game for us, he's our captain".

Shaumkell did his damage against us at our place with his carries up the middle.

I'll be surprised if he's not too. He continued to take the kicks even after Hall came on at half time against cas, and he has a really good reputation as a goal kicker. Personally I don't think Hall is nailed on for a regular place this year. We have three full backs in the squad and plenty of quality competiton at centre and wing. He's 35 next month and this might be the season where he becomes a bit-part player. But again, that could be totally wrong!

I think Moors is back in the UK now. Yei we were only told that he'd be here "in the New Year", perhaps he's waiting on a visa hence the vagueness, but that's just a guess.

Plenty of evidence they won't - for a start Hankinson and Lacans (whose agent said Toulouse wanted him) came to us, they would probably have fancied Cozza too. Moreover club officials have said that they may have 1 or 2 more signings to make but will be relying on upgrading reserves/youngsters for depth. A Leigh-style spending spree clearly isn't going to happen. That said, they won't be pushovers, they still have a fair bit of quality, especially in the back 5 with Latrell Schaumkel and Matthieu Jussaume who gave us lots of problems in 2021, full back Olly Ashall-Bott is very talented too, and overall they have about 12 players who return from their SL squad. A lot will depend on how their half backs go, especially Josh Ralph, who looks pretty handy.

Either Oxy's been hacked, or he's making a sardonic comment on the wild enthusiasm for the Bulls' recruitment amongst some of RL's clickbaity sites.

The RFL has produced a handy losses/gains list for each club in the Championship. Stand by for the derivative "each club's biggest loss/key signing" any moment in the usual outlets... https://www.rugby-league.com/article/61317/every-confirmed-transfer-for-the-2023-betfred-championship

Kyle Evans is an interesting signing, not least because he's hard for most of us to assess as almost all his career has been in RU so most of us won't have seen much of him. Reading the Wakefield board (and he only played three games for them) it seems the feeling is they would have liked to have kept him but already had an excess of wingers. It looks like he's one of those players who would probably have been good enough to get a SL contract had he been younger and thus becomes available to a Championship club. It's probably not surprising that we were interested in a wing as Gaz Gale wasn't as effective in 2022 as he had been in 2021 and you would think they will be in direct competition for a place in the starting line-up. That would leave Hall, Leilua, Hankinson and Hardcastle (who could play back row of course) as 4 potential candidates for two centre places, a nice position for the coach to be in.

It's just been announced that this game - which takes place on Saturday 4th February and will be the first competitive fixture of the season in any of the 3 leagues -will be live-streamed on OurLeague. Only 32 days away! Right, am off to rest my fingers after scrolling down and deleting the rest of that post...