WE had five superb matches in round one of Super League and one game that was farcical.
Salford’s 82-0 at St Helens on Saturday night just happened to be the game that was scheduled for BBC live coverage.
How unfortunate was that?
And whose fault was it?
It appeared that Salford coach Paul Rowley was being petulant when he named a team on Thursday that was far more inexperienced than the team that had played in the Challenge Cup against Midlands Hurricanes last Sunday.
And nothing he said in his BBC interview on Saturday night gave us an adequate explanation for him having done that.
So clearly the fault lies with him for the scale of the defeat.
But what is frustrating for me is that this was a disaster that many of us could see coming a mile off, given the lateness of the takeover of the Salford club by new owners.
Clearly the RFL’s process on clearing the takeover may take more than just a few days.
But someone at the RFL should have been aware how vital it was to create a good impression for a match in the opening round that was to be broadcast live on the BBC on Saturday evening.
So surely it would have been possible to give a dispensation to Salford to play their strongest side on Saturday night, even if the formal process of approving the new owner hasn’t yet been completed, with a proviso that it would revert to the previous position if the new owners were not given the green light.
In the unlikely event of the new ownership not being approved, the RFL could then have adopted the previous position at some point after Saturday’s game.
If that were not possible (and I can’t see why it shouldn’t be) then the alternative would have been for someone from the RFL or RL Commercial to contact Salford and Paul Rowley to stop him from doing what he did, which brought the game into disrepute, in my opinion.
Leaders anticipate a crisis and head it off before it happens but nobody at the RFL or RL Commercial appears to have tried to do that.
In fact the RFL should have dealt with the Salford crisis at the end of last season, when it could have taken action that wouldn’t have put the game into a crisis.
They didn’t do that and now they have allowed a club to bring the game into disrepute by fielding a wholly unsuitable team in a fixture that probably had a bigger audience than the one that watched Wigan and Leigh last Thursday night. Could anything be more damaging?
Without excusing Salford at all, this problem should have been anticipated and action taken to avoid it happening.
If the governing body doesn’t have the power to take action to avoid this kind of problem, then what is its purpose?
I’m not at all surprised that the majority of clubs now appear to be declaring that enough is enough and that they are going to bring about change at the top.