Their first season without Michael Dobson, be interesting to see how they run without him.

Fair point. But they have signed a scrum half with a bigger rep than Dobson in the NRL, and personally would have said Burns moved himself into the position of higher contributory factor last season.

Hard act to follow though.

Sounds like London is pretty unanimous, though i think they'll put up more of a fight than most think. Tough one for the second team but wakey, bradford and possibly cas without chase could struggle

London definately then its a toss up between Cas ,Wakey and the Dulls so depends who has the worse injury list or if the Dulls players get paid!!

Cas will do a lot better than that. They have a decent squad, and one of the best coaches.

Don't you think Leeds will be near the bottom

If we suffer further financial problems (possible) or have an injury crisis then I’d say we’d be in the mix for the drop. However, if we manage to keep the existing squad together and get some good luck with injuries then we’ll be nearer 8th or 9th than 12th or 13th. We have cover at halfback for the first time for a while and 4 bona fide decent props.

IMO London are faves for one of the bottom 2 places. Wakey I’d say are in the mix. Further afield I’d say Widnes are possibles if they don’t improve. While Cas should do alright now they’ve got a decent coach it’ll be interesting to see if they have the quality to improve much on last year a lot rests on Seymour and Finn. If they don’t do well it could be a difficult season.

So teams are going down at the end of this season? How is it working if they are dropping it from 14 to 12? Presumably just the bottom two go and then no-one comes up until the end of next season (2015)?

No, why, do you?

No

London & Wakey definitely!

Hmm, while I would not question the actual possibility that Wakefield are probably going to be in the mix the fact that you think GH will engineer Wakefield's demise is quite laughable... which club did we play in our biggest SL home gate of the 2013 season again? Oh, that is right, the regular rounds don't matter & GH doesn't care about it or the 8k worth of extra tickets & walk-ups he pocketed!

I opined earlier that GH wouldn't want to lose Bradford from SL from an income POV, therefore my guess would be that the other club to be relegated (sacrificed) will be Rhinos de facto dual-reg club Wakefield because it's between those two IMO.

I said nothing about GH deliberately engineering Wakefield's demise. I merely indicated that history teaches us that any club entering into any kind of relationship or significant dealings could well end up in a far worse position and fighting for their survival as was the case at Bramley, Keighley and now Hunslet. Some may believe Wakefield have nothing to worry about given KH's current role there. She was also one of the directors at Bramley just prior to them being wound up which could well be mere coincidence of course in a [i"being in the wrong place at the wrong time"[/i kind of way.


Last season the biggest home gate for Leeds was against Wakefield... 18,837 compared to the 16,604 in attendance for the Bradford home game. But you know as well as I do that the attendance for the Wakey game was a fluke on a day of extreme warm temperatures and a sultry warm evening which tempted more people outdoors than usual.


Leeds attendance for the home game against Wakefield in 2012 was a meagre 12,272 which was the lowest of the season. Even the Catalan (Att: 13,282) and London (Att: 13,109) games attracted more.

Of course I knew that which is the reason why it was important to demonstrate the agenda behind Inflatable Armadillo's highly selective attendance by countering it with an equally selective attendance from the previous season.


The attendance was 18,387