It will be fascinating to see what happens if Catalans were to be the ones to come down and how the RFL manoeuvre the restructure so they can go straight back up.
I see a recipe for a Frenchy Franchise in the making courtesy of michelin man Nigella.

Can't see Catalans going down. The machinations to keep them in are gathering pace. Firstly we have Bird's ridiculous reduction of suspension, next there will be a glut of Widnes/Leigh/London players up before the Disciplinary, and what odds Tony Gigot appealing successfully, yet again, against his two year ban?

He didn't want a nickname that some people wouldn't like so he picked one nobody liked.

Indeed but I do believe he had an excellent fact finding mission to the USA before it, or was it a fat finding mission? Who knows, it was all bollox if you ask me.

It could have been worse. if he'd gone to Canada we might have finished up as Halifax Dock Leaves

IIRC The suggestion was that we should be called Halifax Bombers this was obviously non pc hence the ridiculous Blue Sox moniker making us a laughing stock

I am going to be controversial here, but I don’t think the Bluesox name was as bad as people make out. I think we use it as an excuse for everything else that went wrong with the club. Yes we had the odd joke thrown our way (but so does Bulls**t, the Whinos, the Worriers), but the thing about the name was everybody knew which team it belonged to and that was the idea behind it. Most fans actually took to it, we could chant the name, more than most clubs did with theirs. The fact that commentators still (accidentally) refer to us as the Bluesox so many years after we got rid probably tells you that it was actually quite a strong brand. Had we been successful on the field then I’m pretty certain we wouldn’t have had such an issue with it (we certainly didn’t in 1998 when we finished 3rd) and it wasn’t the name that caused our demise, moving from Thrum Hall was the main catalyst for this.

It was said Bombers might upset the Germans. A) who are they? and B)Who cares anyway?

I agree with that. It also the same idea that Bradford took half of our fans that also bores me to tears. At the same time if Bradford did steal any of our fans we had the same resources as them so we would have nobody to blame but ourselves if that did happen to be true. Crowds were already dropping even when we did finish 3rd and have steadily declined since despite us having some success. It probably does not help that as good a stadium we are lucky to play in, it is an absolutely awful ground for atmosphere unless it is at least half full which at the moment there is no danger of.

Unfortunately true about the stadium.

In terms of the Blue Sox name, I didn't mind it at all. The "Bombers" name would have (imo) been totally naff. That said, I do prefer plain old Halifax RLFC!

Regarding the stadium, Thrum Hall used to rock with 4000+ crowds, with the scrattin' shed an awesome bedlam of noise when we got going. It's all down to the roof, unfortunately with a high sloping roof meaning that stands need to be pretty full to generate any real noise.

Just seen that Toronto have just signed Ashton Sims from Wire.