Sounds a good shout!

Forget the boredom at the bottom of SL. What’s really missing is excitement at the top of the Championship. As a fan, it’s pretty hard to get too excited about your club playing to be granted the right to make a PowerPoint presentation. The Championship is an entertaining league in its own right but all UK sports fans like to dream and this lack of real aspiration is behind the dramatic fall in Championship crowds this last two years.

Was relegation really that bad? To me it seemed to deliver the right result. When teams struggled in SL, they’d drop out and with the parachute payment keep hold of some key players, develop a few younger ones in their year in the second echelon, have a good, winning season, bounce back and continue in SL much as they were before (Hudds, Salford).

If the relegated side stayed down it was probably because of more deep-rooted problems within the club requiring fundamental changes (eg Fax)

The only time that promoted sides that failed to be competitive were the ones that went up beyond their means (in fact, Leigh was the only one). Many times clubs did rather well (Hull KR, Widnes)

We were always told that the problem was that the gulf between the two divisions was too wide and the time to prepare too short yet this could have been solved by changing the timings of the two division’s seasons and, heaven forfend, rewarding the clubs at the top of the second tier a little more than they were.

That said, despite the intractability of this ‘problem’ the only club to overstretch itself was Leigh. This was immediately leapt upon by expansionistas as being sufficient justification for the resumption of the strangling of all clubs below SL and the continued propping up of various artifices.

They should be made to run around Old Trafford naked prior to the Grand Final kicking off.

Great post, but now be prepared to have both your choice of headgear and dog ridiculed.

Largely agree with that post, WF, though personally I'm finding the Championship to be a hugely exciting league (to the extent that two of the past three weeks I've been to a 'neutral' Champ game in addition to Leigh games), though I'd actually back a return of 'first past the post' with an end-of-season Premiership.

I did mention it's exciting in its own right, but then think what a mouth-watering second half of the season we'd have in prospect in the Championship if there was a more meaningful prize on offer. The quality is pretty good and deserves better crowds than it gets. Having nothing to play for lies at the root of that and I don't think it's sustainable to put on such good quality with nothing to play for. After the next franchise cycle when Widnes get the nod I fear the worst.