iffleyox

I don't know if you've ever worked as a freelancer, but when I did I had a stock response to anyone who offered me "exposure" rather than cash....

and there we go - because no one bothered at the time, I agree with you the ship has sailed, unless we really think that IRL is going to hose cash at them to come under the umbrella? 20-odd posts of common sense and good ideas, shot away because 2 decades ago the RL international authorities showed about as much grasp of strategy and long term planning as they do now.

Indeed, anyone with Zingari in their name is probably riffing off the daddy of them all, the *very* exclusive I Zingari CC, which all the way until 2005 was the only amateur side that had all its match reports in Wisden every year.... If you didn’t have a ground, then some clubs went with Zingari because I Zingari were a well known landmark of the reported sporting scene and you hoped for a bit of reflected glory by association. Probably second in rank only to MCC in terms of prestige.

fair point, my faith in them is marginally higher, though I would expect them to approach things from a strict upfront profit and loss basis rather than strategic cost benefit, which will potentially lead to the same issues in the long term.... I.e. I would expect both of them to cock it up, for but for different reasons and via different routes. Obviously I hope they don't.

while I agree with your sentiment entirely, a lot of the preceding 249 pages is shot through with people doubting the competence of the RFL to accurately make that sort of judgement... (either way, in fairness)

Someone always says this, so today I'll be the southern based fan who writes the response that always comes next... Amateur clubs can play in whatever league you like, no problem with that. As long as League One is semi pro then regionalising it will be an utter disaster for the southern clubs (both the existing ones and those being created). From the Oxford experience, the travelling to the north was a pain in the neck but gates of locals (never mind travelling away support) went through the floor when we weren't playing "proper" clubs. Hunslet rather than South Wales was worth 100 on the gate, when the average gate in the first season was about 200. That's a quantitative difference. It's exactly the same issue as Torontonians keep telling us is the case with Toronto (and why I believe them). There is no player or fan interest in Toronto without playing in an established league. If Oxford was going to be playing Hemel, St Albans, Swindon, etc then it would never have got off the ground as a semi pro club. Player pathways are all very well, but about the most obvious pathway if you did that would be for any halfway decent player to get signed from the southern clubs to go and play at a proper standard in the northern ones. The southern cubs would be a nursery (explicit or otherwise) for the northern ones. If you're going to do that you might as well be an amateur club in an amateur league. In an ideal work we wouldn't start from here, but here's where we are. You want to kill Skolars, Cov and West Wales, and have any other semi pro southern club dead at birth? Put them in a League 1 South.

My point with number 2 is that the clubs might be keen on it, and Toronto will have to give them some figures along those lines. But where's the secretariat at the SL end to do their own figures or properly check Toronto's? With number three, they could - but ideally you wouldn't want them on Toronto's board, you'd want Toronto's board reporting to this person. And ideally you'd want Toronto stumping up the money to pay this person (via the RFL/SL). Which I can;t see happening.

Agree, although I think the honest answer* when Toronto asked to join should have been no. Yes as equal partners was never going to happen, and this halfway house situation of "yes, but only if you don't cost us anything" was never going to cut it in the longer term. Again, it's like no one could really ignore the strategic possibilities Toronto offered (and let's not even get into NY and Ottawa) but no one equally wanted/wants to do the hard thinking of what that looks like or how to get there (or even if there should be somewhere they want to get to). So we got "come on in, let's all cross our fingers and hope we can muddle along without disappointing literally everyone on all sides." With, as they used to say in the TV guides, predictably hilarious results. *as in honest answer from the reality based community after a hard headed look at the structural capabilities of the English leagues for strategic planning.

And a view (presumably from the existing other club owners as much as anything else) on 1 will be the clincher either way because I can't see the SL/RFL doing 2 or consistently doing 3.

another way of saying that is that the governing bodies need to sit down and work out what they actually want, come up with a plan off the back of that, and then arrange things accordingly. Bluntly, it needs a strategic decision on whether the league (as in structure) wants overseas teams or not. We can argue about which way the decision should go on that but broadly it's a yes or no. Then everything else will flow from that a hell of a lot better than the ad hoc decision making and near perpetual firefighting we get instead. And everyone would know where they stood - at the moment it's too easy for (some) heartlanders to project a vision of the M62 drawbridge from one direction, and the expansionists to be dreaming of the big cities across the NH from the other. This ability to satisfy nobody (except of course the oft-forgotten quiet majority who just want to go and watch their team every week and don't care either way) is symptomatic of the utter vacuum at the heart of current NH rugby league, a vacuum where the strategy should be.

Probably not adding much to the discussion but (even as a Toronto well-wisher) it strikes me yet again that this going to come down to the fact that this whole thing isn’t SL or the RFL setting out to have a team in NA so much as a group in NA wanting to be in SL/the RFL. if it happens then the league and RFL will make all the right noises again about strategy but in reality this isn’t strategic in the slightest. There are obvious strategic opportunities, but too many people get confused between those and an actual strategy. Until there is one - from the RFL and SL - then Toronto will always be supplicants in the good days and the first out of the basket in the bad because when it comes down to it they found SL/the RFL - no one in the latter bodies went looking for or asking for them.

the bid needs to be sound regardless of a TV contract because presumably no one wants a situation where a team got the green light on the basis of something which might not happen, which then didn’t happen and screwed said team’s own model and what it was supposedly bringing to the table?

Unless I’m missing something, Tony Collins didn’t write that - he’s just tweeted a link to something someone else has...

Ah, this is why the Hundred is for you! If you're from the NW and have no affinity with Lancashire, the ECB has cracked how to make it relevant to you. Get yourself over to watch the Manchester Originals.

Of course, if people feel strongly enough about it, it can go the other way. Rutland achieved its independence, we in Worcestershire broke free from the hated Herefordian oppressor yoke of the abomination that was Hereford and Worcester, and supplies are still sent to the resistance movement in Huntingdonshire to aid their fight. #prayforsaddleworth

Bees are going in with London Irish as their tenants. Given the general faffing around (in both rugby codes) at the moment about what's going to be played when (and the potential for summer RU and winter RL depending on what's going to be allowed) I'm not sure the addition of a third set of fixtures to deconflict is something that either LI or Brentford would jump at sadly.

I think I've met him.

To be honest I think you're both right - if, in Harry's example, you're a six year old in eg Dewsbury who's dragged to Dewsbury by your family every week until the age of 14 then those players are going to be your heroes and you will go by yourself later on as you get older. If you're a child in Dewsbury who doesn't go to Dewsbury games then you will be watching SL. And you're right in that many many more are in the latter camp than the former along the M62. So every child in every small town is not worshipping their local players, but the small number that go are. Which again, comes back to my take on expansion being as important for the current clubs as it for people wanting to set up new clubs in new areas. We need clubs to pick up as many in their communities as they can for the health of the game. The Dewsburys, Swintons, Batleys, Doncasters, need to get more through the gate (although, as has been pointed out by others, Batley do a lot already), so do the Leeds, Wakeys, Salfords, etc. *And* then it would be ideal if it grew outside the heartlands too.

Somerset's ex CEO, who resigned over ECB handling of various things, is on record on the damage he thinks will be done to Somerset by antagonising their current Devon based supporters. It's not about whether there was first class cricket or not in Devon, it's about how many from Devon travel to Taunton currently. Which apparently is quite a few (and would make sense as it's half an hour from Exeter...)

Indeed, but then there have been some revealing figures bandied about in various places on how large the current travelling Devon contingent is to Taunton, for example. So there is a constituency of current cricket fans who are now over three hours from their nearest live cricket (and being told to support the Welsh) instead of just over 30 mins. That's before you try the same trick with the Bristol based fans, for whom it's *only* a trip over the Severn Bridge, at the height of summer...

Even as a Worcestershire fan, I think the real losers are the whole of SW England - they've taken out Gloucestershire and Somerset entirely but that's ok because if you live in Gloucs, Somerset, Devon, Cornwall or Dorset you can support Welsh Fire in Cardiff...

well exactly - leaving aside the fact that my own side in cricket is being shafted by the 100, I might have been more on board with it if the ECB hadn't gone out of their way to tell me it wasn't for me...

Which is where cricket has finally lost the plot - for the 100, which is taking all the best players and the best weather (well it was before the obvious current situation happened) and dumping them into new teams no one cares about) you don't even have to read between the lines - the ECB has explicitly said "if you're out there in England and like watching cricket this isn't for you. it's for all the people that don't" - which is what you might call brave... Nothing in this thread, with the possible exception of the "international flat pack big city league" is even remotely as far down that road. Overall, long term fans will put up with a lot. And a lot more than anyone who isn't a long term fan. So, to grow the number of fans, long term fans will *always* to a degree, just have to take it. The trick is to not push them so far that they walk away, which (from the noises from some of the counties concerning a slump in memberships on last year (and pre covid outbreak) I think is what cricket is risking.

I totally agree, but the argument for the last 5 pages or so has been almost entirely about making what we've got better and more appealing, not fantasy big city leagues or dropping a flat pack team into Dublin. In some ways, this turned into quite an encouraging expansion thread by the standards of how it usually goes - the conversation for the last day or so has mainly been about expansion in terms of making a trip to the current clubs more attractive to more people where they are. I want more people to discover RL like I did and adopt it as their own. Bluntly, thinking it's great and hoping that the action on the pitch will do the talking is wishful thinking - if it was that straightforward we'd be laughing. And being happy with what you've got, the protect and hold strategy, is usually a recipe for disaster too. I don't mean we need to go haring off in the opposite direction and blowing all the money in the game on gimmicks, but standing still and hoping that the rest of the world lets you get on with it is just as high risk IMO. When teams do it they normally end up descending through the leagues. When whole sports do it....

One more, but despite what I said above this was a cross post. Then I will leave it. I agree with the account of the separate development and everything in terms of what happened over the first hundred years, so as far as it goes I agree with the thrust of this post. However, I would make one small alteration - the third word, "are" should now be "were." We've ended up in a sporting landscape in the UK, if not the world, where sport is basically binary: football, and other. LIke it or not every spectator sport is operating now in football's long shadow, and there's more to learn from each other these days, whether cricket, RU, ice hockey, horse racing, whatever, than there is to stand apart and say "we're more similar to football." IMO anyway. But I accept that there are limitations on space because of that history obviously. I'm not sure we're actually that far apart on this really, but I think the future's going to have to look different to the past, and that means borrowing from other sports and trying to brak out of *some* of what RL has been. Evolution not revolution. Anyway, now I really have got to do some work.