Quote: Bulliac "
My view though, is that a law that is abused to such an extent as the cap is an evidently bad, rule and I have to wonder that if it came up again would a majority of clubs still vote to keep it?
Incidentally, I feel you seem regard the Bulls as "one of the old guard", and I would dispute this strongly. The Bradford club has waxed and waned over the years, being strong in the late 1940s again in the early 80s and more recently between 1996 and 2006 but has had its fair share of mediocrity and general up and downs, not to mention going bust in 1963, inbetween. It hasn't been unalloyed wall to wall success, far from it. Fair enough, we've never been relegated from the first division after being promoted to it in 1973, and I guess that many would rightly say it shows some level of consistency, but it pales in comparison to the Wigans and St Helens teams over a much longer period. We're much more like Warrington than you might think.'"
On the first point - people take it for granted that the salary cap is 'abused' and teams are breaking it, but without any evidence.
How many people making these accusations have actually got evidence that some teams are actively cheating and gaining an advantage, or is it just inference based on the fact Warrington are so far ahead of the rest of the league that they must be doing something that the other clubs aren't.
On your second point as regards Bradford being part of the "old guard" I guess your impressions of old guard depend on how long you have been watching RL. The teams I would regard as the "old guard" ie traditionally successful clubs, are Wigan, Saints, Leeds, Bradford, Hull. When I was younger I'd have had Widnes and Hull KR in that group but its been a long time since they were successful. When Bradford became strong in the 1990s it wasn't so much a new team emerging as an old powerhouse of the game returning to the fore, after all they had been champions in the early 1980s and had Ellery Hanley etc. When we became good under Tony Smith it was a new team emerging because we'd won f-all since Alex Murphy won us a one-off Challenge Cup in 1974.