M j M

Warrington at its widest extent population of 212,000, Wakefield 325,000? If we were to walk away from the Wakefield area it would be one of the biggest acts of self-harm in the sport's history.

For clarity, Larkin and McManus have only just been appointed to the board of RL Commercial.

It's just BS. Unfortunately we all need to stop reading the social media feeds of some of our leading journalists as they are just whipping up fears about stuff that is simply never going to happen.

It's not though is it. There are literally people on this thread asking why L1 and Champ clubs are meeting "in places like Batley", as if they should stop rotating around each others grounds and hire a meeting space in central Manchester instead, just in case anyone from outside the game notices.

The cultural cringe some have around Rugby League is very revealing. And they'll try and pretend it's anyone who points it out who has a problem.

This has been debunked.

It was a meeting of Championship and League One clubs, I think they always hold these at one of the club's grounds. Mount Pleasant is one of the better ones with appropriate facilities to hold such a meeting. Have we got to the stage where some fans of the game are so ashamed of Rugby League coming from working class towns in the north of England that we have to stop going to or even mentioning their existence?

Blease's role at Leeds involves spending the money allocated to the football budget by the Leeds board. I have no idea what it is you think he can do from there to endanger the club's future.

You're just making stuff up now so I won't FTT.

This is crazy. British Rugby League was stuffed full of New Zealand players in the 1980s and 1990s, all born 20+ years earlier. My team alone had more players just from Auckland than there probably are Welsh-born players in all of Super League. Those Kiwis didn't spring from nowhere, they came from a local production line which reflected local interest in the sport.

Fundamental to setting up new clubs is establishing a fan base. In both Auckland and Canberra there were people who followed the sport - and played the sport - in decent numbers. The sport was not virtually unknown. That simply isn't/wasn't the case in places like Perth and Melbourne.

Pretending Auckland and Canberra are in any way similar market propositions for brand new pro Rugby League clubs as London, Melbourne or Perth is absolutely absurd.

Obviously it would, yes.

For all the wealth the NRL has their record on expansion is utterly abysmal. They have one team located in a place where Rugby League wasn't already very popular. To be fair to them (or more precisely to News) that team was given tens of millions of dollars in support over its early years to keep it going. Since then they have added more teams in RL heartlands or heartland adjacent. They seem unable to even commit to launching the Perth team without substantial government support.

I think we've at least established that this is a load of rubbish and was never likely to happen. It might be the excitable thoughts of one or two of our more flamboyant owners but the serious people, including Nigel Wood, were never for it. Apart from that I share your despair. The NRL plan of selecting a handful of lucky clubs who happened to be sitting when the music stopped and sod the rest of the game seems a particularly dystopian future.

I don't know what you think this was but it was a meeting of almost exclusively part-time clubs.

Your post was "if only we hadn't done that [Super League] the game would be thriving." That's nothing like the same thing. Super League was great for the big clubs, mine included. But the way it was brought in and implemented was immensely harmful in lots of ways to the clubs and communities beneath them. The sport basically ended up surrendering what were strong Rugby League areas whilst the big clubs, sort of, flourished. Was it a good trade off? Maybe. Would the game have been in robust health without it? Unlikely. But it's no use pretending there wasn't long lasting damage alongside the positives that SL brought.

I don't think anybody is saying that.

Maybe not from you. But looking through the posts and it's easy to see plenty of the usual self-loathing of clubs and towns that form the bedrock of our sport.

At the risk of repeating myself it just shows how foolish it would be to lock in any of the clubs permanently based on where they are now. Hull KR are suddenly an indispensable club. I don't disagree with that assessment but 5 years ago nobody would have said it.

I don't think Batley have ever hidden what their ambitions as club are and what they want to be. Their post was inartful. But the underlying disdain some people have for Rugby League clubs like that, who do everything right in the way they're run and in their communities, tells us quite a bit.

It'll be the same as 1995, a small number of teams go ahead and the rest of the sport is allowed to wither. Killing off pro Rugby League in the Wakefield district will destroy one of the sport's largest remaining ultra-loyal, player-generating heartlands, with a population more than Wigan and St Helens combined. It would be wilfully stupid. But then I strongly suspect these guys don't really know what they're doing.

Bradford offer a lot less to the league right now than Cas or Wakey. And I'm not sure they have much scope to grow much any time soon to even the levels of those two clubs.

I think you've answered the point there - these journos are all sticking this stuff out there because one of the others did and they don't want to be seen to be missing a story. Even if it's not true and was never likely to be true.

Slightly devil's advocate here but why should people have to respond to every bat**** story? It didn't pass the smell test when it first appeared and has now been privately denied. A statement that there is no intention to kick Catalans out would be a little weird.