Worzel

Ridiculous queues to get into the away end. Several hundred metres. Hull FC in their infinite wisdom didn’t open the gates until 10 minutes ago. This stuff isn’t hard

Sally Bolton just called and asked if she could have her credit back Always the old bloke that does the work eh.

I do love it when people clutch their handbags about the nature of somebody's challenge to them, asking them to only focus on raw facts rather than have nuanced opinions that have evolved in a rich context of information, and then close with a patronising "You are perfectly entitled to view IMG through rose-coloured spectacles, but some of us prefer to be a little more realistic." You're as human as the rest of us Martyn, do me a favour. I don't see IMG through rose-tinted spectacles. Far from it. However, my personal analysis is that they bring a lot of what the game has lacked over the years and albeit with inherent limitations that is generally a good thing. There are reasons for those things having been lacking in the past. One of those is resources, driven by financial constraints. But that is not the only reason: Poor leadership was the main one. You can do better things than the RFL has done, with less resources and better decisions. I'm also old enough and wise enough to be able to differentiate between somebody being "realistic", and somebody assessing a situation with a cynical eye. Just to come to a couple of your Richard Lewis points, as you flippantly dismiss strategic insight, vision and communication skills as some sort of "PR" fluff. 1. Great Britain. This was partly driven by a corporate affairs strategy to build bridges with Sport England. The funding derived from that relationship was in large part responsible for rebuilding the RFLs finances... ironically enough. 2. Licensing. Much like Framing the Future, this was much needed. The issue with licensing was that it wasn't implemented firmly enough, with consequences, and then because it became meaningless was discarded. I'd politely suggest that was much more down to the very same West Yorkshire defend-the-base 'club' than it was the concept itself, or Lewis. I appreciate this is a world you live in every second of the day, whereas I have an unrelated business to grow, so your grasp of the minutiae of each and every event across 20 years may well be better than mine. But that's not the same thing as having a better analysis. Sometimes you're far better off outside looking in, with real-world benchmarks to assess things against, than you are sitting in the maelstrom of it all.

There's a lot of truth in this. That's why things like "ability to articulate a compelling vision" and "communication skills" are critical aspects of great leadership, not nice-to-haves (re: my Wood/Rimmer point in other comments). It doesn't matter how good your plans are if you can't get people to both buy into them, and get them to lean-in and apply their own efforts in the same direction as a force multiplier. Prior execution competence and the confidence it generates genuinely matters. The sport's growth strategy only works if most of the clubs put their own efforts in at the same time, no matter how good the framework. The IMG approach is a platform strategy "here's the vision, framework and tools, but now you go and do it".

Martyn, I'm sorry to be so blunt I really am, but you see everything through your immovable prism of "Nigel Wood was unfairly maligned". You feel he was an insightful strategist, hamstrung only by his failure to communicate as well as others and some irrational conspiracy of others. It was written between the lines of your original post, and precisely what I was alluding to in my response. For you to then reply with a revisionist history in his favour merely hammers home my point. To be fair it wasn't 20 years, it was just 15. I'll happily revise that mistatement. Richard Lewis did a great job at rebuilding the sport from the nadir of 2000. However, when he moved on in 2007 the RFL then made the mistake of appointing a classic, no doubt previously competent #2 into the #1 position to succeed him. When Wood then himself stepped down after years of mediocrity, they did the same thing again, appointing a non-strategic #2 into the #1 role, in Ralph Rimmer. It was a bit like when you make a photocopy of a photocopy. Same thing, only even weaker. That's the West Yorkshire clique, internally-focused, same-stuff-different-shovel closed thinking I was talking about. Ever since the IMG strategy you've been negative about it (but disguised as "wait and see"), because it is an implied criticism of the Ancien Regime you were close to.

I'm pretty sure that with a free hand IMG would have wanted to move to a closed league of 12 immediately, and only added new teams when the funds were there to do so. "Rugby league people" resisted that, which is why the gradings came in as a compromise. This is just IMG boiling the frog, more slowly getting to the same end-goal. Clubs now know what they need to do in order to progress to an A-grade. In the old days what they needed to do was persuade the local used car dealer magnate to blow £500k on extra wages than some other club's random benefactor, in order to buy the Championsship title. For all its flaws, this is better than that.

The jury will always be out for those among us who are naturally resistant to progressives Rugby League's media rights values have declined to their appallingly low levels as a result of the past 20 years' administrative incompetence, whilst a load of distinctly average people from West Yorkshire fiddled as Rome burned, with a succession of amateurish re-structures that didn't address the core issue. We have to make the product more attractive, and seen by more people, in order to reverse that decline. That wasn't happening pre-IMG. At least this way we have a chance of turning things around. Without it, we were on a path to part-time rugby league and a fate similar to that of the French game in the end in the long term. If people can't see what we've got from £440k in services from IMG already, then I'd politely suggest they've no idea how much this sort of stuff costs. There was a time when clubs would blow that on a couple of expensive Aussie imports. The sport gets far better value from spending it on this.

Thank God. An interview with a man who knows what he's doing, the steps on the road to success and what we need to first. So refreshing. Those of us who work in marketing work with people like this every day, it's normal. But rugby league has never had marketing competence, or at least not since the eras of Oxley and Deakin. I've sat here for 25 years pulling my hair out. The product has always been great, but we need to get people to sample it and these days its stories and personalities that lead to that. Social media creates a generational opportunity for rugby league to bypass old media gatekeepers, and get right in front of people who are open to a new experience without the biases of the past. No more selling to the same, existing audience with an ever-increasing series of price discounts.

Which Cornwall do, I just checked. £330k is owed to related group parties... so bound to be to the Directors, just via Directors' other companies rather than personally I would imagine (the tax efficient way of organising things).

Surely a mix of as many media as possible is better than concentration though?

The answer though is precisely what the IMG media strategy is designed to do: Own your content production, and distribute short, action-packed clips and teasers of it where people are (which is permanently on their smart phones, consuming social media). You can then direct them to places where the full matches are - including games that are currently live on broadcast media. That's why the structure of this deal was so important. RFL now have all the content, and can use it to proactively generate audience. The NBA in the US has massively increased live TV viewership through this type of strategy. Exciting times.

I'm not sure a direct, first-hand witness account is hearsay. We can evaluate it, and choose to believe Roy Francis or not, but it's evidence nonetheless. I've no reason to not believe Francis, and so choose to.

How many of those crimes were committed by the owner of the club? More than one at last count I think...

Paddy McGuinness

Yes, they've definitely implemented a coordinated "news grid" as part of the comms strategy to build up to the first weekend. It's great to see competence in action for once!!

To be fair he's still honoured in the international game with an award still bearing his name. We don't have many awards, so it seems reasonable to share them out. His being the name on the Grand Final MoM award was always a bit odd on reflection, the first SL GF was probably a better opportunity to change things up but we didn't then so c'est la vie, here we are.

Aye, true enough

OK, that makes sense. I'd do the same if I got the chance.

Serious question to any Cas fans: Does anyone know why Castleford wouldn't flatten the railway terrace during this project, and use the space to make the pitch the right length? There's loads of room behind that terrace, and compared to other elements of the project surely removing and rebuilding a shallow open terrace at one end is relatively inexpensive.

Yes, to be fair I agree, but only for appearances sake and the opportunity you highlight to draw the direct relevance out. But I'm not sure it's that big a deal in terms of how they might feel about it, I have no emotional relationship with my great grandfather who I never met and I doubt any Sutherlands do theirs.

Martin referenced the family's feelings, I was just picking up on that specific. To be honest it was a bit weird that it was named after Sunderland anyway. Presumably journalists used to select the winner and so they decided to name it after one of their own which was fair enough at the time, but we can definitely do better now.

The audience numbers belie that idea re: value, even if yes the demographic profile is older, and worth noting the BBC online audience skews far younger than it's TV audience (the age profile is true for all linear television, inevitably there's a lag to deadoption amongst segments who've longer ingrained habits). Terrestrial linear remains important for new customer sampling and new audience creation, and gains more second-level traction in other media so does still have a ripple effect on top of its direct impact.

Let's speak frankly: Rob is unlikely to be with us come October 2025. There is a real world timeline that explains the reason for why they're doing this now, rather than after "one final season" with the Harry Sunderland Trophy. Perhaps they could have announced it 6 months ago and done that, but ideas occur when they occur sometimes. Harry Sunderland died 60 years ago, none of his children will still be alive and I'd be surprised if any grandchildren were. So all in all it seems a reasonable time to do things.

They've had one for 25 years, unfortunately he's not stood and delivered any meaningful club infrastructure and just blown his wedge on first team players.

This is a great idea: Recognising the spirit of friendship and mutual support that is the heart of what a lot of rugby league means would have been even more powerful than recognising Rob's individual achievements and his own struggle. Feels like an opportunity missed maybe?