whatmichaelsays

Depending on the club you support, football has a "use it or lose it" element that encourages fans to keep buying / attending as demand often outweighs supply for tickets. A Leeds fan wanting a ticket for their trip to Sunderland this season needed to have attended 12 away games in the previous season to have a chance of getting a ticket. On the other hand, I'll have no problem paying cash to the Leeds end at Salford next Thursday.

The "least bad" option here would be to use what is left of Salford's central funding share to run a skeleton side until the end of the season, and provide cap and quota dispensations for current Salford players so that the club has a fighting chance of raising some capital / cutting costs through player sales. Realistically, all of this should have been sorted months ago, but that's spilt milk now. The competition and RLC are in too deep with the competition and events such as Magic to lose Salford at this stage.

They will, but I don't know to what extent. For what it's worth, a group sale is classed as 10+ tickets per game.

Liverpool

Headingley

For those wondering about ticket prices, I've been forwarded this with Group ticket prices... Wembley:

I think it's the other way around. There will be genuine FOMO for the Headingley game - the idea that a long-suffering RL fan might be locked out of the first opportunity in a generation to win a series against the Aussies? That is going to shift tickets before any others. Once Headingley is sold out, it will push fans who did miss out to the other two games. For all the consternation about Headingley as a venue, it has a lot of plus points and this is one of them.

You missed the "player from my club didn't make the squad so I'm not watching" stage of anger. Let's hope, for the sake of this forum, Tom Johnstone makes the squad this time.

Pre-sale is 2 April. That's one week today. This sort of approach is common for high-demand events.

I'm not advocating for the removal of the salary cap (although I believe it needs reforming and linking to inflation). I'm simply arguing that it's a bad-faith argument from McMannus.

Of course I do, but I do find it something of a bad faith argument. "If we're allowed to do this, we'll be forced to do it" absolves the club ownerships of agency and responsibility for their actions. But I also think that the focus on the salary cap is something of a diversion tactic - the salary cap is perhaps the one thing about running an RL club that has got cheaper over time, yet we seem to spend a lot of time talking about this as if it is the problem rather than, for example, the lack of commercial growth at the clubs. That's on McMannus and he knows it.

I'm not really sure I follow his point about the salary cap. Is he basically saying that the salary cap is needed to save these people, (who we're told and intelligent, classy, business and financially-savvy people) from themselves? The salary cap has been cut in real-terms by around £1.2m in the last 20 years - player earnings are not the problem and they're the ones who are paying the price for the poor commercial performance of the clubs. Also, he is responsible for the business model at St Helens. If the business model is wrong, it's in his gift to correct it - either by growing revenues or cutting costs. If the issue here is that the clubs haven't adapted to the new realities of the broadcast market, I'm not sure why comes across as someone who doesn't think that's his mess to clean up.

This all does seem rather odd. I don't personally believe that investment from the NRL is likely on the sort of scales people seem to be talking about but let's assume it is; is this essentially a plan to leave Wood "holding the baby" whilst the top clubs go running off with the younger, hotter Australian model?

I'll be honest, I didn't take the original comment as being particularly envious. I think it is often the case that the stories of many "self-made men/women" is selectively curated. That's not to say that those stories don't have intelligence, hard work, determination and dedication behind the success, but that the stories often omit the role in which some sort of "leg up" or safety net (or both) often underwrites those things. I think we all are guilty of under-playing or under-appreciating the role that luck has in where we are in our lives - whether that is through birth, upbringing, health, relationships or someone's willingness to take a chance on us. I'm sure that's also true of the people who have found themselves in the position where they can afford to run an RL club. It's not envious to point that out and say "that's why lots of people can't just "entrepreneur" their way to success" - it's simply an acknowledgement of how society works. I'm not envious that Jeff Bezos was fortunate enough to have parents that could invest $250,000 in his website idea - I just think that should be a bigger part of the "started it all in his garage" story.

I also think this Leeds team needed a lot of "tough love" that Arthur has brought to the club. You saw it in the documentary where the players were clearly tired of Rohan's light-touch, "focus on the positives" approach - the sight of Rhyse Martin with an obvious "I want to strangle you" look when being told to take the positives from that defeat at Hull said a lot about what that team needed.

I'm not saying it couldn't have been open to interpretation (indeed, I'm saying it's fine to infer things). What I'm disagreeing with your assertion that I implied what you suggest. If you want to keep digging on that, that's on you, but there is a very important difference that I think most posters in here can see. And I'll leave it there.

Which didn't imply any suggestion of racism. You're embarrassing yourself.

It's taking some serious mental gymnastics to say that I implied anything of the sort. The incidents were similar in that they involved two sportsmen being reprimand for historical tweets. Had Ollie Robinson's comments been sexist, homophobic, ableist, ageist or otherwise politically questionable, the comparison would still apply. It's fine to have inferred something from my comment, but it in no way means that I implied it.

This will shed some light.... Huddersfield: John Smith's Stadium owners at risk of administration - BBC News The council has been very keen to get shot of its equity in the JSS before these bills landed on the doormat. I don't blame the Giants for wanting to do the same.

No, it didn't imply anything of the sort. That's your inference. The comment is made, and the similarities drawn, in the context of a sportsperson being disciplined for a historical social media post.

Where in my post did I accuse anyone of racism?

There was a similar incident in cricket four years ago with Ollie Robinson. England bowler Ollie Robinson suspended for eight matches for past racist and sexist tweets - BBC Sport Yes, there is a degree of "young and dumb" with a lot of this sort of stuff, but you don't have to be a wise head to understand that if you post something online that is clearly not appropriate, it is likely to have consequences.

Hunslet objected to Bramley temporarily playing at Morley on no other basis than this.

Oh for sure. And equally, there are some examples of disastrous stadium moves even within a club's city or catchment area (Darlington FC is probably the best/worst example there).

It doesn't necessarily have to be a "club killer" and to be honest, given how disassociated the people of Huddersfield seem to be with the Giants, they probably have a better chance than most of making it work. It's another sport, granted, but Rotherham United (four years at Don Valley, Sheffield) and Coventry City (one year in Northampton and two at St Andrews in Birmingham) are recent examples of sporting clubs that have survived temporary moves away from their city, and Grimsby Town haven't played in Grimsby since 1898. Of course, there are nuances to each case (and people will invariably argue that football isn't a fair comparison, which I don't agree with), but it isn't automatically a death-knell.