Social media is 95% nutters and there are "calls" for anything you could name under the sun. Social media "calls" mean absolutely jack.

Lowes is 98% certain to be sacked. At some point. because every coach is eventually sacked. At some point.

Nobody would say lowes is perfect and some of his less attractive attributes grate a bit, but he is a merev coaching beginner, and looked at overall, he has worked wonders in our first year in the Championship. Of course you can pick this game where we lost, or that game where we played bad, etc. But as a season, we have been competitive with the Championship top dog Leigh, who have been putting together their present squad for years, starting our own squad from scratch. I said at the start of the season that it takes years from starting a squad to gradually improve, gel, and - if you are lucky - grow and develop to full potential. We are still in First grade people. Please be reasonable.

Yes of course we will all be disappointed if we don't get back in SL at first time of asking bt in fact the more we have learned, the more we see that this new system is stacked against the Championship clubs, and promotion either for new boys, or even for the top dogs i.e. Leigh, is in fact highly improbable. It works out that after everything you have to go to a SL club and beat them on their own turf in a do-or-die one-off fixture. That is highly unlikely to happen, whether it is Leigh, or us.

Jimmy will in my opinion get us to that game, and that is a great achievement by any standards, starting from zero. But the deck in that game is so loaded that if he does, but we lose, that simply can't be laid as a failure at Jimmy's door.

I believe that if things remain the same then the path to SL is via the 3rd place slot, if one SL team is so bad that it gets beat by all the SL clubs and by the main contender. We could have pulled that off but didn't, as the team we beat was Salford, but the worst team which we didn't is Wakefield. Unless such a scenario falls into place then I just do not see a C club beating a SL club in the big decider. And certainly only an idiot would sack a coach for losing a game which nobody expects them to win.

I don't believe that Lowes has the tactical nous to get the team promoted. He was a good player for the club, but that doesn't translate as good head coach.

There are questions over how much control he has regarding players coming in and out of the club and how much of that control is down to Steve Ferres.

But we still see week in and week out the same stories in the press with the same sound bites "We didn't play for 80 minutes" "We didn't do what we did in training" etc etc

Now, given the size of the squad we have, if a player is failing to do what he's supposed to in training then surely he should be dropped? That was something a lot of people were expecting at the start of the season, that no-one had a guaranteed place in the side and everyone would need to work hard to get in the 17 every week.

But that doesn't seem to be the case, Lowes has his favourites and they get the game time, regardless of how they performed previously. Now we don't see the players at training all week, we don't know how they're performing there and if that performance has any impact on Lowes selection policy.

However, if a player is running round like a blued fly in training then failing to show up on Sunday. surely that should be taken into account? It's all well and good training like a madman if you don't perform in an actual match.

The target for the club this season had to be get promotion. Anything less than that has to be viewed as a failure which has to start the axe swinging above Lowes' head. After all, to quote the chairman himself "I don't do failure"

OF COURSE the "target" has to be promotion - but if the coach gets you to the million pound game, but there you are beaten fair and square by a patently far better, bigger, stronger, faster and richer SL team - how is that "failure"? If that's how it goes down on the day - then how is that Lowes' fault? How is that a sacking offence?

Nobody is arguing that rookie Lowes has been perfect but IMHO his personal target was to get us to the big game, and then have the team ready to play to its max in that game. And see what happens.

The squad on paper reads well...
I would say better than the one that got us relegated in many ways..

However Jimmy doesn't seem to be the man that can inspire them to perform.

I was watching a video of a 96 game last week and the team was good but not full of world beaters like in the years after, It just seems that Brian Smith could extract that bit extra from them.

I think thats what we need at the Bulls a magician of a coach as Mc Bannana, Cummins and now Lowes have not been very "inspiring".

I think Wakefield will not be half as weak next year with Smith in charge for 6 months.

I wouldn't be surprised to see Jimmy not there next season and I wouldn't be surprised to see a certain somebody there in his place

You ain't seen me

That's about the gist of the situation as I see it FA.
It's all about success at the end of the day, but everybody's perception is different when it comes to "who" is responsible for either success or failure?
There is no doubt in my mind that this regime is one of the best run organisations since the days of Chris Caisleys regime, when he brought the best available, coaches, Marketeers, conditioners and players into the Newly formed Bulls.
I believe we are at the start of a new era, and the road ahead isn't easy, particularly when the championship clubs were sold a "Bum steer" from the very moment pen was put to paper in the RFLs policy review document way back in 2012/13.

The fine tuning the RFL brought about gave much more power to the elbow of SL clubs. And we know from what has been said by those who realise the absolute pitfalls a Champ. club would have to overcome before even reaching the first rung of the SL ladder. Marwen K said it on the premier tv interview, followed by Brian Carney in the T&A, plus Paul Rowley and to give JL credit he hasn't made it an issue, believing that presumably it's something we can do nothing about so we get on with it, knowing how difficult it is to gain promotion, against teams who can spend up to £2m on players wages, plus the central distribution money is a million pounds more, and they have been playing in a competition that is far more intense week in week out. So to sum it up if these people who are calling for the wholesale sackings of the club management had have known before the first game of the season that they were unlikely to see the P&R promised by those who



unfortunately control the sport, would they have done half or a quarter what Jimmy has done, or achieved in one season???

I've always been taken by the Wayne Bennett quote used by our moderator Bullseye . " listen to the fans and you'll soon be sat with them". If Hetherington had listened to some very vocal Leeds fans Brian McD would have been sacked after his first season.
The experience in all team sports is that quick fixes and chopping and changing managers/ coaches does not bring lasting success. Of course you need to be pretty certain that the individual has the potential to develop a winning team.
It's not only the current squad who have said he's a good coach. There have been plenty of comments from respected people in the game ( eg. Peacock the other week) who laud his abilities. And many of those have actually been coached by him.
We all believe that we need a better half back.to partner Gaskell. We had one from Warrington but the club did the decent thing and allowed him to stay at the Wolves.
Last year Gale received dog's abuse on this forum . Now Jon Wells is saying he should be in the international squad. Look at his form this year.
Precisely which half back was available either in this country or Australasia? They obviously tried for Reynolds and I suspect are still searching. But it must be difficult to recruit established players ( especially half back) when you don't know which league you'll be in and which salary cap is in place.

The 8X8 system was designed to give the illusion of offering promotion whilst actually preserving the status quo. For sure, promotion is possible, though highly unlikely and it will take someone with more power and knowledge than a mere coach to pull it off. I think the last bloke credited with such powers was born in a stable and, reportedly, worked other miracles too.
If they genuinely wanted promotion they would have [ihad[/i promotion; simple promotion - expecting our teams to compete with SL teams, even bottom end ones, is bonkers imo.

Its my firm assumption that Rugby League is dying in the UK, and this is only exacerbated by its governing body wanting to maintain THIS status quo.

I can't see any Championship team going up this year, and next year its going to be even more one-sided, what with the SL teams rewarding themselves with an 'marquee player', thus widening the gulf between the (lucky) haves and have nots. What other sport would have such a ridiculous system?

More and more our glorious sport is becoming sidelined; in schools, in the press, hell the sheer volume of empty seats at the Challenge Cup final must show something is wrong, but no, the RFL still sit on their hands.

If only they would learn something from the upcoming onslaught of rah-rah boys and their world cup in the coming week, now THATS how to show a world sporting event......

As I am talking with Bulls fans on a Bulls forum, I can say that whatever else they do, the RFL know that they badly need the Bulls in SL and so I am assuming that they will do something to that end if we don't make it this season. The saving grace has been that we have been very good for the Championship, and that show will probably stand running for one more year, but I think no more - after a second year of no promotion our wheels would start to fall off and we would I think descend from a bright young re-birth swiftly into a terminal decline. That would be a gigantic loss for the RFL, who don't actually have any more than a handful of "big clubs" as it is, and a huge hole in the finances of the SL clubs themselves too.

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Can't see Brian Noble coming back, can you?