Those who did not go missed a very entertaining game yesterday. Although obviously a lot of people will have been away on holiday of course.

What really struck me yesterday, though, was the relative dearth of young people at the game. Certainly in the so-called "Family Stand".

Maybe the club seemingly concentrating its marketing efforts through twitterings and facebook and other virtual media is an attempt to focus on the younger generation; maybe its a reflection of cost constraints or maybe for other reasons. But I can't help but observe that almost every youngster (and I include teenagers and into early twenties in that) I see seems to be forever glued to and staring at some mobile device, seemingly entranced and oblivious to almost everything else going on around them.

We never had all this virtual universe stuff back in the original Bullmania days. Back then, I suggest youngsters spent a lot more time interacting with the real world, and with real people - including watching the Bulls - than they seem to now. I very much suspect this step change in behaviour is a contributory factor to disappointing attendances, although maybe being a miserable grumpy old gìt means I just don't "get it"...

But disappointing crowds, at a time when you might expect them to improve, is nothing new. Remember Caisley's tirade against the people of Bradford in 2004, in his annual report? Albeit at crowds twice the size of now. I think it is also a reflection in part of the economy, after years of illusory boom built on debt that in any case largely bypassed the city. And of the wider malaise of the pall of apathy that anyway seems to bedevil this city nowdays.

The bloody freezing shìt-awful weather is hardly helping, though. I had God knows how many layers on yesterday, but was still frozen by the end.

It was that way up to '73. Sometimes it was one conference, sometimes it was regional. I think the move to the divisional system was so that there'd be a one home / one away fixture system.

Before my time too, '73 being the year I was born.

Didn't you get a few games in during your first few months?

I guess that depends on how Sky want to play it. The defining point about SL clubs to me is that they are full timers, so on that definition it would mean two divisions of full time pros under the SL umbrella.

To be honest, I'd have very serious doubts that Sky would want to underwrite it, and right now you can't see who else could and without that backing I can't see the RFL, or the bods running SL, going down that particular route.

And before. My parents were at the '73 cup final against Fev' a month or so before I was born.