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Rank | Posts | Team |
International Chairman | 5480 | No Team Selected |
Joined | Service | Reputation |
Dec 2001 | 23 years | |
Online | Last Post | Last Page |
May 2021 | Oct 2018 | LINK |
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187.jpg [img:2penstlp]http://img301.imageshack.us/img301/5994/saints7sk.gif[/img:2penstlp]
"...the biggest boor, the most opinionated pompous bigot that frequents these
boards and he is NOT to be taken at all seriously. ":187.jpg |
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| He's not wrong though. We're worse than stagnant, we're shrinking. If Catalans are relegated this year, we'll have the smallest geographical spread we've had since we went fully pro in 1996. In the last ten years, we've lost one of our very few big city clubs with >10k crowds in Bradford. We've lost out presence in the capital. We've lost our abortive Welsh venture. We've even shrunk the number of teams from 14 to 12, for even less variety. Meanwhile, quality on the pitch has taken a hammering with very few 'star' players, as our salary cap becomes further and further detached from the NRL and RU.
Some people will point to what's happening in the lower divisions as more positive. But the bottom line is that all but existing committed RL fans don't even notice the lower divisions, and don't care. Which is why an amazing story like Toronto has gone almost entirely unremarked in the national media. SL is the shop window of our sport, and the engine for everything else. People in the amateur game will tell you how grim it is out there now when it comes to attracting and retaining players - that's in no small part due to the failure of SL to showcase the game, and attract and inspire participation.
The rot began when Nigel Wood took over. Essentially, since then, all decisions about the structure and nature of the game seem to have been taken for the benefit of a handful of uncompetitive small-town clubs who demand a seat at the top table despite generating neither enough support nor enough interest to bring anything to that table:
- The salary cap is held down because those clubs can't reach it even as it is, and so clubs with more resources must let the game's better players go. I'm in favour of a cap to stop clubs spending themselves into bankruptcy, but in real terms, the cap is now so much lower than it was when introduced that it is now actively repelling talent. We are, at best, now a feeder competition for RU and the NRL.
- Promotion and relegation throws the whole lower reaches of the league into chaos as clubs focus on not finishing bottom this year, rather than building for the future. There's every chance that this year the same two clubs who swapped last year will swap again. But even if they don't, what was added to the league this year by swapping Hull KR for Leigh? What will be added next year by swapping Leigh or Widnes for Hull KR? Have those changes benefitted anyone outside those clubs? Did they bring a single extra pound in sponsorship income for the game?
We're in trouble. We are not offering a product enough people watch to attract sponsors, or interesting/exciting enough to inspire young people to play it. We can't keep hold of our shrinking number of better players, and our geographical footprint is contracting, inevitably taking media coverage with it. Meanwhile, we design our entire system to allow a handful of clubs which have never been competitive to bounce between the top of the championship and the bottom of super league, and then we financially cripple those clubs which could do better, to make sure they don't get too far ahead of those who cannot compete. All the while, we have a few clubs who could add excitement, new money, new areas and perhaps an entire new country, to the competition, but we place as many obstacles in their way as possible, because why would we want to attract the whole of bloody Canada, or our own capital city, or a huge new area in France, when we can swap Hull KR for Leigh again next year?
We need licensing back. We need a plan which is based on growing and developing, rather than managing decline. We need to move Nigel on and replace him with someone who can see further than the million pound game. We need to reverse what is in danger of becoming a terminal decline.
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