Worzel

That’s not true Dave, taking an extreme position to counter bias is a key part of critical thinking. The mistake many liberals make is to counter bias or misrepresentation with balance. In doing so they concede the principle. Sometimes you need to counter selective facts with opposite selective facts, the balance comes in the combine and importantly the very use of selective facts also serves to highlight the tactics that the people of the other position are taking. It makes a mockery of the hagiography, and in doing so reveals it far more clearly than some “balanced assessment” would. Nigel Wood’s apologists need calling out.

Precisely this. Davidson’s article was useful because it shows the far wider, complicated context that the rest of the rugby league media conveniently ignore in their hagiographies. Of course it was one-sided. It may well contain some inaccuracies, but when you look at Nigel’s whole rugby league admin career in the round it certainly isn’t accurately summarised with “great 2013 World Cup, and good Sky TV deal” Martyn, Derek et al would have us delete entire memories from our brains. I refuse to.

He could get the train instead though. Oh…

Which items on that list are untrue? Inconvenient for the history revisionists I’ll grant you, but untrue?

Please show me another Warrington thread where I’ve proactively come and done this

He’s hardly hidden it

I think Lewis is still a developing talent, with flaws, albeit demonstrably improving in all the key areas. I don’t think he should be nailed on for the Ashes at all, instead that we should assess performances with an open mind during the season. Wane, and you it would seem, apparently think that Williams is certainly a better player. You think he should be the Ashes #6, for “reasons”, no matter what Lewis does during the season. Which approach do you think is less objective, and displays inherent bias?

I might not have mentioned Williams because I hadn’t even noticed him playing Was it him that went up to pick up the “best team on the pitch” trophy? I was too busy celebrating the Challenge Cup so missed it

I didn’t say much after that match? Mate, I was loving every minute of life and still am. Lewis played well in dire conditions - not as well as Sneyd - and did that minor thing of kicking the winning goal from out wide under the immense pressure of 40 years’ worth of 20,000 people’s hopes and dreams. But yeah, apart from that… To be honest I think Warrington are probably struggling with the emotional comedown from being the best team in the final. It’s quite an achievement, bound to distract the whole club for a while.

But he didn’t though did he? Williams was anonymous in the Cup Final. I think you’re confusing him with Sneyd, who is undoubtedly the best #7 in the comp for a wet weather match, and single handedly kept Warrington in good field position rightly getting all the plaudits for it. But never let small things like facts get in the way of your bias

Not at all. Williams is by far and away the best #6 in the comp. You can see it week in, week out. England picking their halves pairing for the Ashes in 2023, regardless of what happens in the two seasons afterwards, is a great strategy and absolutely what would happen in any other elite sport.

Well, here we are, 15 games into the season and Wane’s insistence on pre-selecting his half backs as Williams and Smith is looking ever more astute! Yet another Williams masterclass.

Well done for digging that out Dave So Martyn heard it from the horses mouth, Dwyer uses the phrase “very much focused” which for anyone with half a brain cell is deliberate language that means “most of…” rather than “all”. If it had been all, he’d have happily said all, in fact they’d have have shouted it from the rooftops. The clubs knew the commercial structure of the deal. Anybody in clubland who claims they didn’t is not telling the truth. Regardless, £40k per club per season is very small beer as a retainer, and as we’ve seen the leading indicators from the digital and content work are all very positive. Only by building reach, audience and engagement will we be able to later grow TV rights values and commercial properties. One comes before the other. What did some club owners expect by now? For Sky to have just sent us a mid-contract bonus? This is all infantile. But very much on-brand for the game, unfortunately.

Good quality game that tonight. I genuinely expected Wigan to score again with 10 seconds on the clock though The view on Wakefield has sometimes been that their squad was too thin and they’d fade later in the season, well the people on the edge of the squad are really stepping up and showing that’s not true eh. They’re a great story for this season, and Matt Ellis deserves this he’s doing all the right things off the pitch.

You’re right, it isn’t technically a joint venture agreement and I should have avoided using that phrasing. In part because it gave you an easy “out”. I thought I’d made that clear when I said they held no equity, but obviously not. However, let’s be honest that’s semantics: It is effectively a joint enterprise, with the same characteristics of a joint venture in that the actions and outcomes have a degree of symbiosis i.e. the end-to-end delivery of results is integrated. Failure to achieve is just as likely to be because of the non-performance of the clubs or the sport, as it is the commercial partner. In that sense it’s very analogous to how you’d run a formal, legal JV, including your Eurobasketball example. In cases like that, you don’t set your commercial partner targets to hit and performance manage them for missing them, as you suggest we should have. The revenue “target” you talk about in Eurobasketball wasn’t a performance KPI in the sense you mean. It was a revenue guarantee to the clubs, one that activated a partnership extension option if achieved (to give IMG security). All of the input KPIs in Eurobasketball are collective, governed by the Board of the special purpose vehicle they set up to run the JV. So all parties are accountable for their delivery, or non-delivery. Not IMG accountable to the clubs. So I say again, IMG would not have agreed to the sort of model you say they should have, and Nigel Wood wouldn’t have been able to negotiate one. We may well have been better off setting up a true JV with a governing SPV instead of what we’ve done, but that would have been the same as this is in the sense of holding IMG to account. That’s just not how these partnerships work. I say that having set up and run two JVs, albeit not in sport - and full disclosure one of which worked and one of which didn’t!

To be so unaware of key things taking place in what is a pretty small sport with a small number of senior stakeholders, they are one of either of the following: - Negligent - Incompetent - Not telling the truth There is no 4th option.

Again, I've literally no idea how whatever you're talking to here relates to the subject I was discussing. Have you been watching The Two Ronnies again?

You know I was simply responding the the comment "I remember one club owners saying that he could spend his 39,000 contribution better", right? Your reply makes no sense at all in that context. If you think that we should trust club owners to spend £39,000 better than anyone else in order to generate interest in our game, after all of the evidence of the last 30 or so years failure to do so, then I guess you're very welcome to your opinion but it might be an outlier.

We used to be in "the rest", and I still enjoyed following Rovers, and didn't think the entire league was of a low standard. There are always great teams, solid teams, inconsistent teams and poor teams. It's nice to be one of the first category at the moment, but there's nothing different about the rest of the comp only our perspective on it from a different position.

Precisely this. The ways that club owners can waste £40k in a season on poorly selected playing talent that gains you a couple of points in the year are myriad, almost endless in fact. Unless someone is going to tell me that digital growth strategy isn't important in 2025, and that IMG don't have huge expertise in this area, or that the improvement data in the last 18 months hasn't been huge, then I really do struggle to understand the issue here. Clubs need to spend money on certain things. This is an incredibly important thing to spend money on. If you can't afford it, or think you would be better spending it on something else entirely, then it's simple: You're not aligned with the strategic mission of our elite league, and can go and build a great community club in the Championship where you'd be equally valued and can merrily buy all the over-the-hill Aussie back rowers you want.

If you think that a large multinational agency is going to enter into a long-term partnership contract with a sports organisation that has a very, very long track record of flip-flopping, strategic oscillation and endless myopic infighting that contains easily exercisable break clauses then I've a bridge to sell you. Nigel wouldn't have been able to negotiate that. The alternative hypothesis is instead that this creative deal wouldn't have got done. Look at what we're witnessing now? The rugby league ecosystem couldn't commit to a long-term plan if its life depended on it. Our life does depend on it, and we're still setting fire to this one. Partnership structures reflect the situational reality of their members. This is a Joint Venture, one without equity but with a gainshare on the upside. It is common for deals like that to have long terms, to only be broken in extremis, and for the KPIs to be collective rather than individual, because the actions of each party within it and the results arising from them are simbiotic. There are not simple elements that you can say "IMG are responsible for X outcome". It doesn't work like that, it's a JV.

The evidence over many, many years would suggest otherwise

I'd rather be a Cas fan than a Salford fan. If you don't have the money at the moment, you don't have the money. I've lived through my own club going under, believe me a few seasons' mediocre performances whilst you try to rebuild judiciously is far, far better than that. You lose some years, Hull KR lost decades, Salford might have lost everything. What's your alternative proposal? Castleford borrow £1m off some payday loan merchants to strengthen their squad this season and push for the playoffs, only to implode under the weight of the interest rates in 2 or 3 years time? Sounds brilliant that.

Oh yes, heaven forbid I should use a directly relevant example of the consequences of your alternative hypothesis. How unfair of me! Castleford's issue is that they don't have any more money. If they did, they'd have a better squad. Your argument amounts to: "Yes but if Castleford had the threat of relegation, they would find some means to spend more money on their squad, even though they can't really afford to do so, in order to avoid the potentially worse consequences of relegation in the blind hope they could sort the now-even-worse money problem out later" There is no magic money tree. If they don't have it, they can't spend it. It doesn't improve our sport to have teams bet their entire future existence out of the fear of what one bad year might do to them.

Yes, we need to win maybe 24-6 with a marginally slower line speed and letting opposing players get up in the ruck half a second faster. Anything to stop the hate!