Hammerless Nail

I feel I need to have a moan about this because you're ignoring the weapons grade mardarsery of some gonk moaning about Jake Connor being named man of the match in a pre-season friendly.

Searching for the cloud inside the silver lining is absolute peak rugby league.

Think Salford will go with something along the lines of 1. TBC 2. TBC 3. TBC 4. TBC 5. TBC 6. TBC 7. TBC 8. TBC 9. TBC 10. TBC 11. TBC 12. TBC 13. TBC 14. TBC 15. TBC 16. TBC 17. TBC 18. TBC

It wasn't that long ago that if a club met with disapproval, people on here would be clamouring to replace them with Barcelona or New York or Rome. Now it's "replace them with Goole". I hope IMG have got a plan to deal with this shocking decline in the levels of club replacement fantasies.

If you're struggling to understand how a bloke could ever think that walking around your place of work in the nip and with your todger in a sock was an acceptable form of behaviour, then it may help you to know that Gregg Wallace is a qualified rugby union coach.

Perhaps Degsy is threatening to take it to Judge Rinder again.

He's not expecting to use the train when he gets to Leigh is he?

Has Paul Rowley been linked with the job yet?

It'll be interesting to see what happens next. When he left Salford, there were a few players who were keen to follow him. One even threatened to return to Australia if he wasn't allowed to go, despite having signed a contract extension a month or so before. If those players do the same again and follow him to his next top coaching role, Salford Schools Under 12s Touch Rugby Taster Sessions will have a pretty impressive array of talent at their disposal.

Amir? More like a "meh". I suspect you've got that figure of 10 appearances from Wikipedia, but that only covers 2022. I'm pretty sure he made a few appearances in 2023, and has made a further 10 or so this season. He lost his place when he failed an HIA (I think), and hasn't been able to claim it back, largely because of how much better Joe Mellor has been in that position. The problem is - as Red Willow has already said - that Amir is very slow around dummy half, partly, I think, because he always seems to take a couple of steps away from the PTB before releasing. His passing accuracy has improved, but he had a lot of improving to do. Last year, he was like one of those practice machines that tennis players use that fire a ball at you at some random trajectory. He doesn't have much of a running game either, beyond running in when it all kicks off. His defence is pretty good though. So, Hull have signed a youngish player who may yet improve, but I wouldn't have thought he was first choice material at the moment, certainly not for a Super League club.

Your Salford predictions are more performance art than prediction aren't they?

Not this again. The stadium was far from free. The build was started - at huge expense - by the club and its then owner John Wilkinson. The project was only taken on by the City of Salford and Peel Holdings after various of the funding streams the club and Mr Wilkinson were trying to tap into were pulled away as a result of changes in legislation, reduction in education funding, the sudden death of one of the investors and so on. The club was virtually bankrupted by it and the lack of resource fundamentally ended up with the team finishing 11th in 2012, last in 2013 and the club facing a wind up order. The club was then 'rescued' by Marwan Koukash, who managed to make things worse in so many ways, including signing it up to a stadium rental deal they had little hope in being able to fulfil. And that leads us to where we are today: the current board trying to help the club recover from the expensive stadium build and Marwan's subsequent reign of error, and people on here moaning about it.

The news that the club could secure a 12 month rent free period as part of the deal could send one or two of this forum's more excitable contributors into meltdown. It's important that we, as the RL community, are ready for them should it happen. I know I am..

Come again?* *In both senses: firstly, what you wrote is just a word salad, and secondly, you appear to think you've found some negative news about Salford that you know very little about, but are going to get a chubby over anyway.

Woah there again. I'm not sure this is evidence of the impending Salfageddon either. The new boarding in the stand opposite the camera is advertising a heating company called Carrier, whose corporate logo is - guess what? - blue. The boarding behind the South Stand to the right is green. Does this mean that Celtic are moving in? On the more general point of Sale's apparent dominance of stadium branding and sponsorship, they bought those rights when they moved in. Salford's then chairman, John Wilkinson, expressed his surprise and disappointment that the rights weren't offered to Salford, although I suspect it was more a case of Sale having the wherewithal to go and ask for them.