This I entirely agree with.

Doncaster have just been bought by the football club, so have a lot more resource behind it now. They play in a super league standard stadium. The RFL should be working very hard with this club to advance it to Super League.

Sheffield have been doing an amazing job for the last few years now.

What a huge catchment area it is down there, and could really work with the right help.

I don't believe that, London clubs in any sport have found it easy to attract players...I'm sure a young Aussie/NZ'er or even a native Brit would rather be living and playing in one of the greatest cities in the world rather than in bloody Cas or Wakey...which even though I used to live there and will always have a place in my heart, it is really the back o' beyond and about 30 years behind the rest of the world

Most London clubs aren’t dealing with a salary capped sport where most of the player pool is based hundreds of miles away.

Say you are Ian Kirke for instance, pretty average player, say he is getting to the end of a 70k a year contract at Leeds. London offer him 70k a year for two years, Wakefield offer him 70k a year for two years. Do you expect Kirke to uproot his entire family move down south, have sell/rent out his house in Leeds, and buy/rent one in london for a couple of years or drive 15 miles from headingly to belle vue instead?

With all this talk of fast tracking the south yorks clubs into superleague, it's worth considering the one genuine hot bed of rugby league that isn't represented at superleague level.

CUMBRIA!!

Before you all say it's been done and failed, that was a long time ag. Workington in SL all those years ago was a rushed and very poorly run experiment that was doomed to failure. Nowadays clubs in the whole better run and well equipped to deal with the step up(bar a few xceptions). Lets face it there are no other major sports to compete wth RL in Cumbria.

Maybe it's time for the RFL to look at a way of getting a team from this area in to SL instead of persisting with the failure that is London.


Just a thought!!!!

I think the interest seen in the World Cup and how they have performed in the 9's make Cumbria a good shout. I live up here now and there is a lot of interest. Also there is not much other competition of other sports

A Cumbrian Club is definitely what we need in Super League, but in the future. You couldn't do it for next season. Featherstone, Halifax, Sheffield, are at least set up to be able to compete if nothing else, unlike London currently.

To pluck a club from Cumbria now would be a waste of time. And any super league club from Cumbria should be a merged club anyway.

To me the next logical steps to expand the sport would be:

1) Stabilise and secure the existing SL franchises (although I’m yet to be convinced that Wakefield can sustain the criteria to maintain their franchise)

2) Expand SL using already established RL strongholds – Featherstone, Halifax, Keighley

3) Look at outlaying districts to expand into that already has an interest in RL – Cumbria or Sheffield

Only when the above criteria has been achieved should we be looking to expand into ‘harder to crack’ areas such as Wales or London.

Walk before we can run, baby steps, softly softly catchy monkey, etc. although I suspect the brain trust at Red Hall are already planning a new SL franchise for somewhere equally as ridiculous, like Bath or Southampton.

Fev is a small town in a district which already has two clubs it cannot support. The idea that the future sustainability of professional rugby league on this country is small town clubs in poor facilities like Fev or Keighley is crazy.

Cumbria is an odd one because there is clear interest in the game but the geography of the area makes it nigh on impossible for a pro RL club to be successful, each town individually is too small and isolated with facilities which are too small to make SL a success on their own and they are too disparate geographically to merge.

Sheffield could be a huge success but they need money, they need a Koukash. The RFL need to find a way to attract an investor to that area, though considering they have actively dissuaded the investors already at London from staying with their idiotic proposed return to P+R I don’t hold out much hope for them,

as for baby steps, you cant get much smaller steps or a much softer attempt to catch a monkey than the 100+ years we havent done anything. How much smaller steps can we make?

The suggestion of Fev is to fill in next year, if they want 14 clubs, as London are not going to be able to compete.

In relation to the district, I have said it many times and seen no counter argument to change my mind, Cas and Wakefield should merge as one super league club, and that's it.

The issue with this thread though is what happens next year. Fev, Halifax, Sheffield, are the only ones set up ready to at least be able to compete, if 14 clubs is the required way to go.

London must stay for me, even if it means dropping down a division and re grouping, if the go down no one should come up as they would have no time to prepair and compete.
If London are not ready to go back in fot 2015 then Toulouse must come in, who I think are going to come in anyway or the best most stable suitable championship club, ( we desperately need another French team)

Rugby League is, in my opinion, a brilliant product, ill served by poor strategic direction and poor marketing. Long term, to grow the sport, we need broader participation. But this needs to come from organic growth rooted in local communities. If not it will fail as we have seen with the majority of the "transplant" experiments in Paris, Wales, the North East and to a lesser extent London. With out some form of external financial support, it is hard to fund a viable super league team on the initial fan base and corporate sponsorship that is likely in a non "heartland" area. If we want wider participation to grow the sport we need to put real effort and money into growing the base of the pyramid. If a local club can't field local players it will struggle to hold the attention of its potential audience, this is a long term thing there is no quick fix. For now, I think the priority is to stabilise and secure what we have, we really can not afford to see more clubs go to the wall.

It's the national sport in Papua New Guinea but South Yorkshire? No feckin chance. It is a bafflement to me that London, with so many Australians and so many "immigrants" from the North, can't get more than a couple of thousand to a rugby league game once a week.

You only have to look at the dreary generic kits the teams wear these days. All identity of a club has been lost under cheap, gaudy plastic shirts. It's like looking through a 1980's scousers wardrobe. There are those who bemoan the lack of genuine "stars", but we have characters in abundance, we just don't talk about them. The Australians can polish the proverbial turd when it comes to marketing players. I also think a lot of the character of the game itself has been refereed out of it. It's a tough game, THE toughest, yet the game is almost sterile. I am no fan of foul play (the late high shot was a bane on skilful players), but part of the theatre of the game was watching a $h!thouse get a slap every now and then. You can't look at someone wrong now without ending up in front of a committee.

I hate to say this, but I find most of the games I watch boring.

I think a big problem there is how we write the narrative of our game. Ryan Hall is as good as any winger in world rugby, in either code. People call him WBW but its almost like a self-deprecating joke. It shouldn’t be. The game itself should be shouting from the roof-tops that Ryan Hall is the worlds best winger of either code and that this weekend is a chance to see him in action. Sam Tomkins is known for his broken field running, that should be shouted from the roof tops too. Last year a game against wigan was a game where you not only got to see ‘the best broken field runner in world rugby’ but also your team try and stop him. Create a character around Kallum Watkins, a big, strong, good looking lad with the cool haircut, laid back character and magic hands, Kevin Sinfield as the on-field general, the obsessive leader who drags his troops to victory.

The whole of the country should know who our big name players are and why they are exciting and good to watch. Even if it is that Ryan Bailey is a pantomime villain or that Ben Westwood is as dumb as a doorpost. Football presents its players as something otherworldly performing skills you couldn’t hope to in an environment you couldn’t imagine. It has goodies and baddies, you have your Beckhams and your stories of redemption, you have your Joey Barton playing the villain. We seem to think that what we need is lots of down to earth young men, who work hard, love their families and keep out of trouble, anybody else should be kicked out of the game.

Professional Wrestling may be fake, but its popular because it writes a narrative between goodies and baddies and makes people choose a side and cheer actors in a fake contest, we need to create a narrative and make people pick a side even if they don’t have an association with the game. That’s how fandom starts, a neutral picks a side in a contest, builds an affiliation with that side, and all of a sudden they are fan.

I could say I am the best looking guy in the world, and most people would laugh their t1t5 off. You can't just make a claim that isn't true, you have to have something to back it up.

Ryan Hall is not the WBW, it is something Leeds label as a claim by it's fans, which is fine. If the Rugby League did that, they would be a bigger laughing stock than they are now, because it isn't true. Rugby union as well as Australia would be peeing themselves.

Again "the best broken field runner in world rugby". How are you measuring this, it is completely subjective. The RFL are not going to shout something that can just be laughed down.

The product is on the field for all to see, and people to make their own minds up. Do rugby union go around saying their players are the best so and so in the world? no because they don't need to.