fevtom

Yeah at the moment they look like they could be in trouble. I have a feeling they’ll sign just enough to make sure they’re not in the bottom few but not enough for a realistic play off push. Four months is a long time in Rugby League though so i’ll probably change my mind a fair few times before the season starts.

Right, here’s my way too early prediction. Of course between now and February any number of things could happen and we have no idea how the teams will look at the start of the season. Assuming there’s still promotion, Swinton don’t move to Shanghai and Leigh aren’t taken over by a multi billionaire..... 1. London 2. Toulouse 3. Leigh (Promoted) 4. Widnes 5. Featherstone 6. Halifax 7. York 8. Bradford 9. Whitehaven 10. Sheffield 11. Batley 12. Swinton 13. Oldham 14. Dewsbury

I’ve heard 400-500 but it looks like a fair amount are stuck in Iceland due to cancelled flights and there are no more flights available until after the game. Imagine spending thousands to follow a semi professional team and across continents and that happening.

I also almost said this too (because I remember Stephen Fry saying so on QI) but I googled it and apparently it's not true, it was actually just to make it sound more extravagant.

I agree, I'm just being facetious. I think the Swinton name change is one of the more realistic name change/ merger suggestions but people seem to be in favour until it's their own club that's involved.

To be fair. I think a more accurate comparison would be Batley changing their name to Kirklees or if something happened to the Bulls changing their name to Bradford Bulldogs. Both would certainly give the Bulldogs a bigger target market but I imagine there would be some opposition from a some backward thinking fans.

I do enjoy the northern indie route that they've gone down but Shed 7 wouldn't have been my first choice. No doubt they're a great indie band but they don't feel current enough and are probably more of a cult band these days than one with a mass appeal. If we're just plucking names out of the air then personally I'd have liked to have seen Catfish and the Bottlemen, The Courteeners, The Vaccines or The Wombats (although I know they already did it ten years ago.) Maybe all of the above were contacted and were already busy though, who knows.

I just think people are always comparing Rugby League to NFL expansion attempts and we have completely different scenarios. There's a relatively large niche NFL following in London and very little competition for their sport, hence they can get 1000 applicants pretty easily. We have almost the exact opposite situation so Rugby League has to take a different approach. Setting up new clubs is a fantastic way to do that.

The thing nobody has mentioned yet is that Union has the London market for anyone interested in a rugby. It's what they'll watch, and it's what al their friends will play. Giving them reasons to play League over Union is much more difficult than a NFL academy which is completely different to anything that you usually find in London and will get more attention. If it was that easy why isn't there a huge presence of Canadian Football in NFL strongholds?

We could’ve had a situation (If London had won and Huddersfield lost) where sharing the points would guarantee KR stayed up and Salford get third. If that had happened It would’ve been interesting to see if either teams would’ve actually gone for the golden point or if they’d have just played out a draw on purpose.

This is probably about right. For example the area between Manchester and Huddersfield is miles of rolling hills with the odd few picturesque villages, you're never going to get permission to build much so Manchester itself is built extremely dense. Despite only being a small geographically the M62 corridor population is about 14 million, around the same size of Ontario.

All of the other ones seem spot on and agree with the Halifax website, Love Rugby League, Sky etc. I couldn’t get to the Fax v Fev game this year so I don’t have a first hand account but everywhere else seems to have 1,888 which seems more realistic than 5,203 unless there’s something I don’t know about but perhaps a Halifax fan would know. https://www.skysports.com/rugby-league/halifax-vs-featherstone/50698 www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/sport/rugby-league/halifax-18-featherstone-rovers-24-rovers-strengthen-grip-on-top-five-as-fax-slip-to-fifth-straight-defeat-1-9849296/amp Thanks for keeping these kind of stats on your blog. I find them very interesting.

Going by the figures on your blog RayCee, it looks like every team in the championship has improved this season, with the exception on Leigh. A lot of that might be down to Bradford's away support but still it's good news. At a quick glance though, the figure for Halifax's average on your blog (2593) doesn't look correct. Most of their gates have been under 1500 this year. What figure are you using for the Halifax v Featherstone match? Wikipedia has it at 5200 but the Halifax website announced 1888. I wonder if that could explain it.

Ive heard a lot of complaints over the last few years about how predictable Super League is and there’s too much of a gap in quality. It’s usually used as an argument against expansion to 14 teams but when you look at the stats there aren’t many leagues closer. The bottom team in Super League has won 32% of their games including against the league leaders (although with a few players rested.) Compare that with the bottom team in the Premier League last year winning around 7% of their games or union around 27%. Our problem at the moment is one team being better than the rest rather than one or two teams being worse than the rest.

Keighley Cougars 16 v 24 Hunslet Doncaster 36 v 12 London Skolars North Wales Crusaders 24 v 16 Coventry Bears Oldham 18 v 30 Newcastle Thunder Workington Town 58 v 6 West Wales Raiders