LeytherRob

Clear rip that

Think the Ferrari is gonna need a good pit stop at half time, looking more like a Fiat Punto currently

Don’t think you’d miss either team on a dark night. The hi-vis derby.

Pratt has had a great game. I bet KR did not think they’d have nearly as tough an opening 2 games as has transpired. Clinging on again. This season has really started with a bang.

Rules have changed, but it was always for ball carrier i believe, defenders is new for this year. Right on cue Walmsley gets one. Bit harsh to be honest considering KR got away with a couple of instances of stopping the game.

Think Jack Smith is using them as a cop out to avoid the decision of giving a penalty vs issuing a green card for holding up the game

Weird person to be assigning credit to considering he's been a passenger through the actual takeover process and his only chance to take action has been widely derided throughout the game on both sides of the world and brought an investigation on Salford.

Leigh look set to beat last season's opening crowd (also against Hudds) of 8580. Hopefully should get above 9k with a few days to go plus walkups on the day.

The clubs didn’t ‘try their luck’, Salford put out a statement saying they would sell players imminently and also voted in favour of other clubs getting salary cap and quota dispensation to sign their players.

Great stuff and agree regarding the production quality, it’s really well put together

I get your point but i think there are 2 separate points to be discussed on this: The effect of IMG coming into the game on the clubs desire to better themselves - an undoubted influence for me The value that IMG are able to add on an ongoing basis through their direct input into TV deals, marketing etc - this is much more debateable. It's hard to draw the line on what would/wouldn't have happened at Leigh had IMG not come in place and we'll never know for sure, even DB would be an unreliable source on this. I don't think they'd have pulled the trigger when they did on the name change and certainly not gone as extreme as they did. DB himself admitted there was a panic over the level of franchising that could potentially come in and they had realised that there very little differentiation between Wigan and Leigh in colours, kit and nickname. The music/pre-match entertainment wouldn't be too dissimilar though as the seeds for that go back to the 2017 SL season where they dabbled with various pyrotechnics options before the majority of matches and also had a few singers on also. Some of the other initiatives like the switch to membership from season tickets would also have come in I think, but maybe not as 'balls-to-the-wall' as they did under the shock and awe of the Leopards first few months.

Yeah and it feeds down into the fan base - I had a Salford fan on social media telling me that they'd had to help themselves every step of the way, I had to remind them that the past 2 years they've been kept afloat by the collective generosity of inflated transfer fees on Croft/Ackers/Dupree, massive amounts of council resources and of course £0.5M in advance funding agreed to by RFL and the other clubs, any one of those disappears and SRD go bust.

The backs to the wall, us vs the world, siege mentality has always been Paul Rowley's modus operandi going back to his days at Leigh. I don't see this ever changing.

If they'd actually taken any action in terms of shuffling the squad after being placed in special measures, they also wouldn't have half the problems they do now in terms of squad numbers. Even if they were confident of the takeover and long term cashflow, they could have sold on 1 or 2 bigger earners and signed 3 or 4 fringe players on low money to provide short term options with low impact on the cap - there are still free agents out there like Ryan Hampshire or Luis Roberts, even Jack Walker for a while when they were under the measures. Moving on someone like Tim Lafai would have actually done themselves a favour considering they have been sitting on 3 quota centres.

Yeah I agree 100%, without IMG Leigh don't look the same as they do right now. I don't think IMG can claim any direct credit in terms of their input, but the impending presence of them coming into the game and the uncertainty of what that would mean was sufficient enough to give several clubs including Leigh and Wakey a monumental kick up the backside when it comes to getting things together off field. For which i'll always be grateful to the IMG era.

Think KR will have too much for Wakey, particularly with their injuries but reckon they should keep it fairly tight though and hopefully a nice big crowd to go with it.

Salfords tactic throughout this whole process has been to consistently split everything into a series of extreme, binary decisions of 'let us do X or you are forcing us to do Y', and it really bugs me how little they've been directly called out on this nonsense.

Not sure if anyone else has noticed this, but there seems to be a marked uptick in original stories/reports on the BBC RL site this season compared to previous years. Over the past few years I've found the reporting on it became very formulaic - match reports of varying length with some coach comments to local radio, and any transfer/contract stories copy/pasted direct from club statements with not a lot else. Recently we had the article on Jonah Cuningham which was highlighted on here and it's nice to see them following up at a good pace with more new content. Even the HYS articles with comments turned on seem to be getting more comments with a much lower % of trolling in there. Here are a couple just from the past 24 hours or so. From 0-1 to 82-0 - The wild results that made Super League so compelling - BBC Sport Wakefield Trinity: New-look team & stadium point to bright future - BBC Sport After a bit of a letdown in terms of quality for the 2024 BBC coverage, is the tide starting to turn?

They’ll have to sort out the roads around the area, bad enough getting in and out when the grounds half empty, would dread to think how it’ll be with 15k.

Not retyping it but see above, this specific instance has no previous precedent. It’s obviously difficult to prove you aren’t resting players who have niggles when they do it before big games, however if there is a paper trail of you attempting to name those eligible players(with a few who aren’t which invalidate the squad) then proceed to go with option B things get more complicated.

Another interesting day ahead tomorrow. They may actually have good cause on this, whilst some will say ‘clubs have fielded weak teams in the past for finals etc’, a club has never done so with 2 squads and an ultimatum as SRD did - “let us use squad A that breaks the rules or else we’ll send squad B”. If squad A contained some eligible players then the club have admitted there is no cause for what squad B contained other than a deliberate act to undermine the competition.

Best evidence would be that multiple eligible players named in this rejected 15 man squad never played yesterday. There’s absolutely no way that Brierley, Nene, Marsters, Nikorima etc weren’t named in the alternate squad

He isn’t criticising them for following in Leigh’s footsteps, he’s criticising them for intentionally putting the sport in a bad light. The behaviour, or history of any club is completely irrelevant to that fact. Just like it hasn’t stopped you criticising Leigh despite your club having troubles of its own in the past(and not should it). and ultimately, if you can’t refute what he’s said without a lame attempt at deflecting criticism onto ancient history then maybe he’s got a point this time eh?

Yeah plenty have drank the kool aid and just blindly accepted what Rowley has said even though it falls apart very quickly under logic.