Eddie

Because he has no source and even SL wouldn’t be that stupid. It would be like getting one of the more fantasist members of this forum to pick.

Agreed, putting London in would be purely for the word London and nothing else.

It isn’t true, thankfully.

They’re a competitive (usually) team fulfilling SL fixtures, who offer a great Saturday evening tv slot and away fans love going to Perpignan, what more do you want? I can’t think of any championship club who’d improve SL by replacing Catalan.

Do you think more people want to see their team play Huddersfield than Catalan then?

Agreed on the away fans comment, if SL clubs need a couple of hundred travelling fans to survive we’re in a worse place than I thought.

All rumour at the moment. However if the two ‘lucky’ teams got no central finding that would probably be it for me.

It’s easy to say we when it’s not your money. If you were the owner of a skint SL club you might think differently.

As in the IMG takeover?

I agree with your sentiment entirely, but the game is run pretty much hand to mouth and I don’t see where the money is coming from for this. Ultimately the first team will take precedence over everything because that’s what generates income.

Someone who hasn’t played an NRL game isn’t necessarily worse than the alternative. The primary role of a club is to make that team as strong as possible, sadly most don’t have the resources to invest heavily in youth set ups if it means the first team struggles.

Plus the risk that they’ll never be first team ready. I can understand why clubs want this, as much as we’d all like to see them focus on youth teams etc.

It’s not cheaper to bring an Australian over than play a young English lad. There are visa and accommodation costs for a start.

I went around 20 years ago as part of a four week (pre kids) trip with a couple of mates. We flew to Moscow, went to Yaroslavl and got an overnight train to St Petersburg. We then got a bus to Tallin, went to Helsinki and back, and then spent some time getting buses through Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. From Vilnius we got the train to Minsk, and from there the train to Brest and then on to Warsaw, then down to the Tatra mountains and Krakow, where we flew back from. A cracking trip, though not easy on the liver, I loved all three Baltic Republics.

Do we have our own better players then?

Thats partly because the FA pours money into youth football, it can afford to. We may also have a golden generation which by chance has come together at the same time, which happens, in football see Belgium recently, plus the Czechs in the 90s and 00s, Romania in the 90s etc etc.

I’ve always thought it was to try to prevent the more commercially viable clubs accelerating away from those who don’t bother and just rely on TV money, a race to the bottom.

How do you know that? There are some great SH players in SL who enhance the competition hugely.

Have you ever tried to have a conversation about rugby league with someone from Liverpool or Manchester, let alone set up a load of teams? In the 80s and early 90s a fair few people knew about it and had a soft spot for Saints or Widnes, now I doubt many people know or care the game exists.

If SL is expanded by two that’s 36 Australians who can come over before it impacts opportunities for English players.

What would you suggest?

Where is this money to drench the community game coming from?

So if you’re a chairman of a club with a relegation threatened team and you have £100k to invest, do you bring in an Australian player to improve the team or invest it in a youth system that may (or may not) produce a player in 10 years time? Until clubs start working together and stop pinching each other’s youth players the answer is clearly the former.

Increases the player pool to get to a more interesting 14 team super league, I like it. Let’s not forget some clubs aren’t actually allowed to have top tier academies, so how else will they get players, all of their youth talent gets taken from them by the clubs that have academies.

It has always been the case, clearly.