Should we be allowed to enter

Quote: McLaren_Field "Beaten to it by about 20 years.

I live in North Leeds, about five miles from Headingley, within a three mile radius of my house there are four or five Union teams playing in various Yorkshire leagues, we're talking about your average local clubs manned entirely by volunteers and I haven't included the pro Leeds Carnegie RU team in this.

12 years ago when my eldest was still at her Junior school one of the local RU clubs hosted a weekly tag rugby sports lesson at her school, they provided all of the equipment and paid an RU qualified coach from the nearest RU club to host the lessons, culminating in a knock out competition at Carnegie college with a dozen other schools - the whole season was funded entirely by the English Rugby Union.

Fast forward and my brother (a life-long Leeds RLFC supporter) is a qualified RU coach at his local club because his two boys wanted to play, the club that they play for has a team in every age group from 8 to 19 and then three senior sides - again this is a Yorkshire League club with no professionals involved - I volunteered to set up a web site for them and now run that and the amount of funding and support that they get from the English RU has to be seen to be believed.

In short the ERU support the code right down to grass roots, there are no splinter groups, there is no other organisation wanting to run their own leagues and play at a different time of year, there is no diversion of funds into ill-advised experiments, there is just a well run tier of support for volunteers to lean on while trying to organise 150 to 200 kids (per club, remember this is times four in my local area) into organised games, training sessions, cup competitions and leagues every week from September to April.

Its staggeringly efficient and by comparison the Rugby League are stuck somewhere in the stone age.'"

The funding comes about entirely because it`s a rich sport for the ruling elite and theres very little the RFL can do about that .