Quote jimlav="jimlav"People who say we can support 14 teams are kidding themselves. First off we do not currently have the talent in terms of players to support that many teams, and the Aussies we can import are often of a terrile standard. All you have to do is look at half of the teams.
Secondly, and most importantly, the finance is not avalable to support 14 teams. This is plain to see and I doubt any one is stupid enough to argue the point. This is the 4th year of 14 teams and how many teams have gone into adminstration? bradford, celtic, wakey and the crusaders didnt have the finance to carry on. thats a club a year that cannot carry on.
To be honest, despite what chairmen have recently stated, i think this is the tip of the iceberg. there are plenty more clubs that are struggling with their finances.
I for one would praise the RFL if they reduced the amount of clubs in SL. I know a lot of fans would be scared that their clubs would be the ones that miss out and therefore wouldnt support the idea, but for the good of the game long term i think this is the best way forward.
Having 12 clubs, who can all spend to the SC, who can all compete in the league is the ideal. imagine how much better the international team would be if every week every game was of the standard of wigan v saints or warrington v leeds. all the players would get so much better because they are playing at that high level, unlike now were wigan didnt even get out for first gear to beat london by a large amount.'"
How the hell would reducing to 12 clubs suddenly mean those 12 are all top quality and can all spend to the cap?
We don't have enough clubs that are good enough. That's obvious. But if we just kept those that are then we'd only have a 5 or 6 team league.
The financial benefit to the clubs of moving to a 12 team league would be about £200k, but that would be reduced by having 2 less home games.
I'd agree there are still too many overseas players, but that number is and will reduce year on year as the rules start to bite. Plus there is myth put about that if we simply get rid of all or most pverseas players it would solve our problems. It won't. The sad fact is that whilst many of the overseas players are "average Aussies" they're often still better than their British, homegrown alternative.
We need to stop messing with the format at the top level, 14 teams is fine. Are we really saying that the few "good" players at the bottom 2 or 3 clubs would suddenly make the other 12 competitive? Leave it at 14, make it plain it will be a 14 team league for the long term then everyone knows where they stand.
We need to focus on how we coach and produce youngsters and then how we integrate into an open age setup, because far too many young lads are being picked up at SL academies without the proper skills. SL academies shouldn't be a place where you're having to teach a lad how to pass a ball, that should have been done years ago at grass roots level. And that is the far bigger issue, in my eyes anyway, rather than whether we have 12 or 14 teams in SL or even if we have P&R or licensing. Until we change the frankly sh|t nature of many of our amateur teams and leagues then we'll never compete with the Aussies and we'll never produce enough good homegrown players to fill a full-time league.
