The Phantom Horseman

Er, no. I started this thread because I think there's widespread ignorance across RL social media about how the IMG scoring system is going to work. I don't think many fans have read the actual Grading Handbook, let alone a 148-page thread on this website. And as I mentioned in the original post, I think there has been very little nuanced debate in the RL media of how the scoring is likely to work out (other than the odd attempt at classifying the Performance section). You talk about the "already known details". I read a lot of RL forums and I don't think the average RL fan really has much grasp of how it's going to work at all. Of course, when the illustrative gradings comes out, if everybody just nods and says "yeah, makes sense, that's how I thought it would work out" then I'll have wasted my time with my post. But I don't think that's what will happen.

The one I was worried about was Connor Jones' late hit, which I thought was a shade "later" than Bretherton's hit on Lacans. Joey's alleged off the ball tackle was conveniently shielded from the cameras by a girder in the stand (though may have been visible from Toulouse's camera on the other side of the pitch). Either way, no bans, we move on.

No bans for either side from this game (£125 fine for one Toulouse player).

The only bit I could find said that - in the future - Category A teams (rather than SL teams) would need to run a women's team.

That's a fair point but I'm not trying to pass judgement on that or say those things are unimportant. I've seen quite a lot of posts on social media saying that team A or B won't stand a chance under the new system because of the state of their ground, and as the title of that section suggests, the point I'm making is that it doesn't really matter whether your stadium has fantastic modern fan facilities and looks and feels great, or is a delapidated throwback to the 1950s, you won't lose or gain points because of those factors.

Reading across social media and forum land, it seems clear that there are lots of RL fans who still haven’t really got much of a grasp of what teams will and won’t score points for in the IMG scoring system that will replace promotion and relegation from next year. There are even one or two fans who haven’t realised that traditional P & R ends after this year, but they’re probably beyond help. Unfortunately, if unsurprisingly, there hasn’t been much insight from the world of RL journalism (with a couple of honourable exceptions), so here’s my take on what I think some (not all) people may have missed in terms of the impact of the new scoring system. Not claiming to be an expert here so this is just my own opinion but these are the things that have struck me from reading the handbook. A reminder that the Grading Handbook can be found here https://www.rugby-league.com/uploads/docs/Grading Handbook (Final Version).pdf On-field performance won’t matter as much as many people think: We know that teams are ranked from 1-36 based on league positions (where they finish after the play-offs), and that these numbers are compiled over three seasons. We also know that these positions are divided by 0.1111 point ranges between each finishing position, so for instance the team ranked 7th will earn 3.3333 performance points and the team ranked 8th will receive 3.2222 points. You might think this seems a fairly narrow margin, and you’d be right. But it might be even tighter than that. For instance, if one team finishes 14th in the Championship each of the three years (ie losing Grand Finalist each year), and another team 17th in each of the 3 years, the team that finished 14th might still only have 0.1111 more points than the team finishing 17th. That’s possible if, say, the teams finishing 15th and 16th have one good year (eg a year in SL) that sends their average up above the team finishing 14th. Given all the different criteria that can earn much more significant chunks of points, on-field performance is going to be relatively insignificant when separating teams that are likely to be challenging to be one of the 12 SL teams. It will be a massive advantage to have been in Super League at some point in the last 3 seasons: When IMG first announced the criteria for their points scoring system, some of us thought they must have forgotten to include an important component – how the various figures would be weighted depending on what division a team had been. It gradually became apparent that they hadn’t forgotten that component – they simply were not taking it into account at all. So if a team that has been in SL for the last 3 years has an average home league attendance of 3,010 and a team that has been in the Championship has an average attendance of 2,990, the former will gain 2 IMG points and the latter only 1.5. This makes little sense, surely – both the attractiveness of the opposition, and the away following, means that you are inherently going to attract far bigger crowds when hosting the likes of Wigan, St Helens and Leeds than when facing, say, Whitehaven, Sheffield and London. A case in point is Leigh, who are averaging around crowds of around 7,000 this year having struggled to reach 3,000 against some of the less attractive Championship opponents last year. Additionally, there are other IMG point-related benefits from being in Super League. The massively larger central funding leaves more financial possibilities for spending on infrastructure etc, and being in SL is also likely to provide a boost in areas such as merchandise sales, TV viewership and social media following. And of course, finishing bottom of SL in three consecutive years will still score more points in the Performance aspect than finishing top of the Championship three years running. It doesn’t really matter what your stadium is like… From a spectator’s point of view, anyway. All the IMG points-scoring system is concerned about is whether or not a stadium ticks nine very specific boxes, almost all of which are concerned with the needs of broadcasters and sponsors. It’s all about things like…whether there’s at least 50m x 50m space for broadcasting trucks, whether you can get at least 50 people in the press box, whether the directors’ box has at least 40 seats and is positioned near the halfway line, whether the corporate lounge has at least 200 capacity etc…it’s nothing at all to do with the spectator experience. Having a shiny new stadium with great fan facilities won’t score you any points, nor will you lose any if you haven’t improved it a jot in the last 50 years. Think of the worst stadia in RL…they won’t lose any IMG points. There is the theoretical possibility that you could lose points for failing minimum standards tests, but there have been minimum standards throughout the SL era yet they never seem to be enforced. There are no IMG points for having a Women’s team, an Academy team, an LDRL or wheelchair team You do have to have a Women’s team to be classed as Grade A, and you have to have an RFL-approved Talent & Performance Pathway. But otherwise, zilch. The seemingly random thresholds for the Catchment Area scoring boundaries look extremely suspicious The way that points are awarded for the Catchment Area aspect of the IMG system is that you take the population of the Local Authority District where each stadium is situated, and then divide it by the number of tier 1 and 2 clubs. So for example Bradford and Keighley are in an area with a population of 546,400, which divided by two leaves a Catchment Area figure of 273,200. Featherstone, Castleford and Wakefield, all in the Wakefield district, have a total population of 353,100, which divided by three gives a Catchment Area figure of 117,767. IMG have decided to award three tiers of points in this area, so teams will either score 1.5 points, 1 points and 0.5 points. So where have IMG set their thresholds? A sensible suggestion might have been, say, at 300,000+ for 1.5 points, 150,000+ for 1 point, and 0.5 points for less than 150,000. Or maybe 200,00+ for 1.5 points, 100,000+ for 1 point, and 0.5 points for under 100,000. But no, they have come up with the seemingly arbitrary figures of 260,000 for 1.5 points, and 130,000 for 1.0 points. There is no explanation on their Grading Handbook as to how they arrived at these thresholds. That seemingly artificial threshold is very convenient for the two Bradford-area teams and very inconvenient for the three Wakefield-area teams. It’s almost as if the thresholds have been deliberately chosen to ensure maximum points for the former, and minimum points for the latter. There are other aspects of the scoring system that are questionable too, but these are some of the main ones that struck me. This isn’t intended as an anti-IMG crusade, I hope it will work and overall we have to give it a chance and support it. But when the first set of “illustrative gradings” are announced at the end of this season, my prediction is that there will be bemusement, and maybe uproar, at how some clubs are scoring higher than others, because I just don’t think the scoring system is well understood by fans yet.

For me I'm not sure there's a right or wrong answer to whether we play our best team or rest a few against Widnes. I think there's a lot of merit in both arguments. For instance, with Johnno Ford, we can't deny the injury risk, and we can't deny the importance of game time given we have 2 weeks until our next game, especially as he has only played one and a half games since his bad injury. For that reason I'm happy with whatever James Ford decides, he sees them training and knows where they are in terms of attacking and defensive schemes etc.

Of course every Featherstone fan knows that Hanley try commentary was a tribute to an even better one that earned a similar commentary in the 1973 Challenge Cup Final between the same two teams... "Smith's still running...Smith's still going in and out...oh, what a try!" Part of the Grandstand opening sequence for what seemed like about the next ten years, that try.

Think he has a good job outside RL and Josh Hardcastle said in a recent interview that if Fev had been promoted last season he would have retired, he came back for one last year to have one more crack at getting Fev up.

Some useful updates from James Ford on James Deighton's show on a couple of our players who have been out injured... Briscoe will be doing runnng prep this week, running next week and they'll see how he goes in those sessions with a return for the semi in mind. Hau had to have longer out than usual for the concussion protocol because of his youthful age, was available at Toulouse but not selected. Mackenzie is back running and Ford said he had asked him if he was ready to play and he replied "ready to kill". No mention of Springer. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0gffsg2

So...we're celebrating winning the League Leaders' Shield at a game against Widnes. This must mean Widnes are getting promoted, right?

James Lockwood confirmed as retiring at the end of this season. One of the most widely-admired players amongst his peers, as well as coaches, in the Championship.

Hardly a surprise but the club has today confirmed that James Lockwood will retire at the end of the season. What a servant he has been to the club. He has been an automatic selection for every coach that he's played under in his numerous years at Fev, and that's a lot of coaches. Massively admired by his team mates too, when Cameron King was asked to pick one Fev player he thought wouldn't be out of place in an NRL team he cited Locky, that might have been a stretch but it certainly shows the regard in which he's held. Let's hope we can mark his retirement by seeing his club finally reach SL.

Something else about Ford, for someone who came to us with a reputation as a poor defender he has been pretty solid in his limited appearances to date, and he caused two turnovers with big hits in defence on Saturday. Obviously we all know the issue with him is his durability but he's a reassuring presence when he's on the field.

Yes there was a definite similarity, but didn't they call that place "The Cooler"? I'm not sure there would have been anything cooling about that changing room in that heat!

Oh wasn't it just? You won't see a better cutout pass than that in SL. I don't think it's any coincidence that Lacans had his best game of the year with Ford in the line-up. He's like having a coach on the field.

Leilua Moors Lacans

Yep, that was one of the tries of the season that York just scored. Good half of RL that, thought both teams played well.

Looks just as clear on the Toulouse version of the highlights from the opposite angle.

Depends on what his contract states in terms of having a relegation get-out clause. His name gets mentioned on just about every SL forum as a potential target though, young, British (so non-quota) middle, they're at a premium.

There was an article on rugbyleaguehub suggesting both St Helens and Wigan were interested in him, so we might face an uphill struggle to get him.

Think to a degree what I said here all still applies, what we saw on Saturday was partly that if both teams are missing a few, then our depth is way stronger than theirs - we don't really lose much whichever players in our squad play, we barely have any "fringe" players this season, whereas the drop-off for Toulouse is significant once they are having to look beyond their best 18 or 19. That said, though, we don't know for sure how many Toulouse players are ready to come back, and it sounds like they lost another one in Shorrocks yesterday. If Ralph, Jussaume, Harrison and Peyroux all return, their team will have a totally different look to it, but who knows how many of them will return. Moreover, I thought we bullied them physically yesterday especially in the second half, and it was noticeable that we were making far more yardage than them, especially up the middle. From that point of view it was important psychologically. Also it's really good that all the turmoil and uncertainty that we faced just a few weeks ago when Long was removed after the Halifax defeat is now gone and there certainly didn't look anything wrong with the players' motivation or commitment to the cause yesterday. Interesting from a tactical POV that Lacans - who has played almost exclusively on the right this season - played on the left, and Ford, who has spent almost his entire career on the left hand side, played on the right. Whatever the reason, it worked as Lacans had one of his best games in a Fev shirt. Some very difficult decisions now for James Ford as it had previously looked a straight fight between Aikens and Chisholm as to who partners Johnno (assuming Johnno plays of course). Thought Moors was really good too, he doesn't charge in these days, he just rumbles in but he's very effective as he's so hard to put on the ground, it's like watching the big but slow kid in the under 10s who the smaller kids just can't tackle. Gale (twice) and Leilua unfortunately dropped kicks looking into the sun in the first half which proved costly but both bounced back, especially Leilua who gave his opposite number Armitage a torrid time. All in all a very satisfying win, meaningless in itself but hopefully a positive sign for the play-offs. One final thought, I hope that little concrete shed that we had as a changing room had air con (but I doubt it), it didn't appear to have any windows and the Fev players came out and waited outside a good few minutes before the kick off in the second half.

Nothing too serious I hope, hope she's on the mend.

Yes, that's clearly what happened. Even if it had been Hall that released the ball, the ball went backwards to Kheirallah who was behind him, but as you say, it was a clear ball steal and would have been a penalty to Rovers if Kheirallah hadn't scored.

Which try are you referring to?