Past few seasons:

a)LLS has shown them to be the best team
b)It's unfair top spot doesn't get the title

But now it looks like leeds will finish top

KEL SUPRISE!

It's all gone rather quite on both those fronts.

Of the fans who have said all along that there should be more importance placed on LLS I have not seen one say any different since it became obvious a few weeks back the chances of Saints retaining it were slim.

This thread might be worth resurrecting if Saints reverse the last two seasons in the GF.

Hopefully HKR will stop either club winning it

Its simple isn’t it? Leeds have the most fans then every super league club put together therefore we get to say what is the biggest trophy.

TBF I dont mind if we finish 1st or 2nd as it means very little, in fact by Leeds finishing 2nd it would probably mean we dont have the pressure of beating the team we chose in the semi... anyway, as long as we beat Rovers at OT then thats all that counts in my book.

What a cheek. It's the Leeds fans who had reclassified the hubcap. To them the hubcap was stupid, unnecessary and they didn't want it, their prize was the GF victory. Now they are in a position to win it almost 20,000 people turn up.

I think the amount of people who don't like the play offs and GF is spread equally amongst all teams. There are plenty of supporters of all teams who don't like it.

Saints fans have, on the whole, never bigged up the shield. There also hasn't ever been an usually large crowd when we've been receiving it either.

saints won the hubcap

You're right on your last point, I actually ended up in a prolonged argument on the Saints forum a couple of years ago after you'd won the LLS and I was trying to congratulate your team

My position on the trophy has always been the same throughout superleague - Sky have wrongly diverted the attention from the most consistent team of that season to the one who can win three (or four) knock-out rounds in a heavily biased format competition.

Obviously they do this to promote their own interests but they've gone further than that by virtually ignoring the league title in favour of the Grand Final concept - I think the GF is an excellent competition, the play-off format always was an excellent end of season competition but it never distracted form the other major trophy that had been awarded at the end of the league rounds - we don't have that major trophy any more and anyone who takes the time to have a lok at the old league leaders trophy and compare to the hubcap will understand how its been so demoted.

The great shame is that supporters of the game who have only ever known superleague have bought Sky's marketing in its entirety.

The LL shield only has any credibility as a trophy if all sides have identical fixtures. This year has been slightly better with only the magic weekend spoiling things (Saints would be level with Leeds otherwise). The previous seasons' five or six extra games rendered it utterly meaningless as a trophy.

Finishing top is great for your GF prospects and should be the aim, as a measure of who is the best it's irrelevant.

Finish top after 27 games is irrelevant but 2 knock games are

So why not just play 2 knock out games and stop wasting time with the other 27?

Seems logical