Thats quite a trip from hull! It'd be quicker to london! but the point is a lot of fans would be prepared to go there, but not to wales or london as its Rugby League territory

Hence the idea of a more vitalised Championship standing on its own two feet.

'Haven also suffer from being part-time, with good jobs keeping the players from going fully-pro. Not an issue Barrow has to contend with (that I am aware of) so the latter do have a good chance to build forward. Just don't do a Donny and go all out for it, a sustained improvement over the next three years is the way to go.

The current argument against a merger is precisely that the distances involved mean that fans would not do that. I would think that after 3-5 years you might get some travelling support from accross cumbria, but at those distances you will only get the hard-core few. Better to have the nucleus of one club that a smattering of "hard core few".

I agree with that

Surely eventually we could have more than 14, maybe we could go up to 16 in 2012. Halifax and Widnes I would say. Cumbria needs more time, for a stadium and some sort of agreement to get it sorted.

I think we could go to 16, but we'd have to loose the magic weekend (or incorperate it into weekly rounds). But we just couldn't ever have every "traditional club" in we would have a league of around 30!

I disagree TBH. If the RFL can tick the 'Cumbria' box they will, no matter which team it is. The team would effectively be a Cumbrian team anyway, as all the best Cumbrian 'locals' would be part of the set-up and also many 'ex-pat' Cumbrian players in SL (Gardners x2, Lupton, Purdham, Wilkes, Harrison etc).

A merged Cumbrian franchise will never happen and is pretty unworkable. Haven and Town dispise each other and Barrow is almost 2 hours away from them up along the 'road to hell' that is the A595.

I doubt many of the Celtic fans would describe their club as 'exotic'.

But I do agree that if any one of Barrow, 'haven or Worky can come up with a strong enough squad and attract reasonable crowds they should be considered on an equal basis with teams from new areas.

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Seriously, didn't Workington make preliminary enquieries, but realised quickly that they wouldn't make it.

No we didn't.

I think Whitehaven made noises about applying in 2012 though, but there's been no progress made with their new ground and they've got big financial troubles now so I guess even that is a long shot now.

That would never happen. Ask any Swinton fan if they started watching Salford when we were in SL. The same could be said for Leigh fans with Wigan and Hull KR fans with FC.