Quote: Peter Kingsley "The reality is it means nothing for the weekly rounds. We've had 15 years of the grand final and on only 3 occasions has someone outside the top 2 won the competition.
Teams will still try to finish as high as they can because if you finisng in the top 2 you have - 2 home games to get to the grand final with a week off. If you finish lower it is more tricky.
Finishing in the top 2 will be still be the main priority for title challengers and that will give them the best chance of winning the competition.
Leeds have an exceptional record in the grand final, it's the same spine that won 3 grand finals on the trot, an unprecedented achievment and they've managed to overcome the handicap of a lower position to win the trophy again. They are worthy of the tag champions.
Top 8 is too much, but we have what we have and that's the way it's going to. It's nowhere near as detrimental as people are making out.'"
I imagine they will, and whilst not suggesting teams would aim for 5th I do think Leeds twice winning it from 5th has exposed an anomaly within the playoff system, vis, that whilst the top 2 teams are potentially only 2 games from the final, 5th place can get there in 3 games including a Week 1 home fixture against 8th. When you add to this the fact that their Week 2 opponents will have come back from an away fixture against 1st (unless they beat them) it suggests, to me, that coming 5th isn't as disadvantageous as it should be in order to encourage a real race for the top.
The league element accounts for 90% of the competition, after all, so I think league position should affect your playoff structure in a way that it currently fails to; none of this 5v8 or 2v3 nonsense.
Once again you show you have no idea about how elite athletes are conditioned or the nature of sporting form and confidence. Given that Hetherington said the Leeds team would have been dismantled and many players released had they not at least got to the Grand Final during the poor mid-season run it is implausible to claim that they were not "working their hardest". Unfortunately they were not, at that time, able to win as many games as they wanted.
