Exactly, clubs no the rules before the season starts, to win the competition you need to be good enough on a regular basis to qualify, and good enough on the night to win. If you arent, you dont win but either way the fans get a great spectacle where the best team in SL is crowned in a magnificent stadium, with great visibility, in front of a massive, packed house and they have to do it by beating the 2nd best team as well as some combination of the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th best team to even get there.
What a great spectacle it is.

Wigan V Leeds in 2010 and 2008 and 98, Leeds v Wire being separated by a kick in 2006 and in 2011, Wigan V Hull and Wigan V Bradford in 2007, Wigan V Saints in 2009 and 2011, Leeds v Catalans in 2009. Wigan V Cas in 2009, That Bulls V Saints game in 99 and again in 02! That Leeds v Saints semi in 2007 was as good as any game i have seen in SL, and then we got to watch it again, with even more riding on it a couple of weeks later. There have been some unbelievable games in the play offs, at a higher intensity with a higher skill factor.

The 7 months prior clearly arent inconsequential, they are part of the competition. People say this since Leeds won from 5th, almost like it was a plan for Leeds to finish 5th. Leeds struggled with a massive injury list at the beginning of that year, they started from behind the 8 ball and lost touch. it wasnt a plan to finish lower or hold something back. We were simply poor at the beginning of the season, which made it harder for us to come back. Leeds came back and won the play-offs not because they finished 5th in the regular season, but because they were better than their early season form showed.

My preference would be to build towards 16 teams over the next 2/3 years and split into two conferences of 8 and get rid of the whole LLS part season trophy nonsense. (I appreciate the argument over player depth, but i would look to have at least one of those as a french team, which means only taking one more team out of our player pool, something which we should be able to do)

That may well be the case for two teams but for at least half of the league (often more) the contest is pretty much over after two months which then lends itself to far more inconsequential fixtures than we have now. When teams still have something to play for they play harder. When they're out of it, as it was under the FPTP system it means that they don't play hard every week. This begs the question just how true an assessment the FPTP league format is when you end up playing more matches against teams with nothing to play for than you do under the current system where every game is a jostling match on the playoff ladder.



I agree with you on the length of the competition but for me this is a twelve team competition and that's where the problem lies not with the playoffs. A twelve team league would also mean we could go back to a top five or six play off too which was far more effective than the current top eight.

I agree with your sentiment, but not completely. The playoffs do at least one thing, they guarantee a 'last day thriller'. The problem (well it's not a problem really, just a fact) with RL is that the kind of finish you saw in the football season is much rarer. Even if two teams are close at the top, if one of them get Widnes, say, on the last day, it's title over before kick off. Real upsets are rare in RL, when they happen it's usually down to a weak selection, e.g. Wigan Widnes, but a team playing for the title on the last day isn't going to drop half their best players.

Agree. Part of the reason it drags is the cannon fodder, that like it or not shouldn't be in the competition. I hate the fact that we don't have enough good teams for a competitive large league, but the fact is, we don't. And its no good trying to equalize things by dragging the top down, we want our top sides, and the players in them, to beat the Aussies.

The problem with the current play offs is in its ignorance of consistency prior to the event.
If you look at the extreme scenario, Wigan could go through the whole regular season without losing a game and playing a great brand of rugby all the way up to the grand final. Widnes struggle all season and some how by winning a few more games and other teams losing against each other managed to finish in 8th play off spot but are 20 points away from Wigan and 6 points away from bottom place.
Wigan play Widnes in the final, Widnes win and are crowned super league champions, but in season terms are they.
The play offs don,t reward consistency in the right way and the 4 play off games are given much higher value than the 27 games preceding it. Maybe they should go to the ultimate extreme and have a top 14 play off, so they give the team at the bottom of the league th opportunity of being super league champions.