Powell urges focus on survival

Daryl Powell believes the sport’s primary focus has to be the survival of clubs.
The last week has seen a number of topics, such as promotion and relegation and a revised schedule, come to the fore.
However, Powell believes that the game’s rulers should direct their strategy to what will ensure the stability of clubs.
“The key thing is that we get the game up and running and that the clubs start to get some revenue in with a functional sport at the end of it,” Powell told League Express.
“That’s more important than anything else. How we manipulate that at the end is for the administrators to decide and they have a very difficult job on their hands.
“I don’t think anything can be off the table. You have to look at what’s going on. Toronto might not play a home game and that’s an unfair disadvantage to them.
“Regarding the Championship, Leigh have put a lot of money in, Featherstone and Leigh have started really well, so there’s enough there to step up. The issue has always been the number of players we have playing in this country at the top level.
“It’s all about looking after people. It’s ravaging the world, not just our pretty well-off country. We have to look after each other both physically and also help some of the other countries that are far worse off than us.
“Look at the health issues and the ability to manage this situation in some parts of Africa and other areas where they don’t have health services like ours. It’s going to be catastrophic in those places.”
Powell doesn’t however, believe the prospect of three games a week is sustainable for players, as was suggested could be the case by Gary Hetherington.
“The game itself would suffer,” he said.
“Five-day turnarounds are pretty tough, but then if you go into four-day turnarounds consistently, it’s not viable.
“I think that idea of Brain McDermott’s is an interesting one, he’s talking about 60-minute games. Realistically, you can’t do three games a week on a regular basis and burn the players out.
“There’s no point riding the players to death, otherwise there will be no quality in what we’re doing. We need to be smart with it and there are different ways of putting it out there. With Thursday and Friday games you can span it out, play a Thursday then a Sunday, and you’re opening the next week for space. It doesn’t have to be Sunday, Wednesday, Sunday.”