What's the £30k cover? Doesn't seem realistic somehow.

Wakefield receive financial penalties for playing at B.V. maybe those clubs who refuse to have a reserve team should face a similar penalty?

So what would happen of most clubs decided to stop running academies?


Regarding reserves, as another poster put, yes a young player going out on loan to a championship/L1 club will benefit them so much more than playing a reserve game. But that's for those who are ready and developed at 19.

The reserve game isn't designed to be a high level necessarily. It's to allow those who are too old to play academy, to continue playing rugby. Not everyone is physically developed like an Oledzki, Burgess etc at 19.

Also some of those who the club does deem good enough but then have no where to play get shipped from pillar to post. Jordan Lilley played for about 4 clubs last year. How is that good for a young kid? Watch an interview when he signs with us. He'd fallen out of love with RL. This is a kid who probably lived, breathed RL since 5. Yet he wanted to walk away together. Whether he's good enough is irrelevant. He's probably found his level with us. But its about trying to keep as many in the game at possible. Making a decision on players at 19 is farcical IMO

No clubs have expressed such a thing so pointless question because it won’t happen.



You make it sound like the whole of RL has made a decision on a 19 year old, they haven’t, one club has and the player can and do move on to another.club.

Lilley did seem to fall out of love with the game. Can we guarantee that wouldn’t happen if he spent the next few years playing in Leeds’ reserves hoping for the odd game or two a season playing against mostly kids before being let go a few years later rather than move on now? Keeping plenty of players on (many who clearly won’t be good enough for the club’s 1st team) to have enough to fulfill fixtures just to have a look at one or two in the hope they show more is just selfishness by the clubs.

Wigan had to hastily arrange a reserves fixture last year to get Manfredi some game time to shake off the rust, because he can't play in the U19s. The gap between 16 year olds and 19 year olds is massive, but they're lumped into 1 team together because of the lack of reserve teams. Yes, Dual Reg & Loans are options, but this relies on having good relationships with other clubs. There's no point sending out a 20 year old kid you're looking at as your next ball handling loose forward if the DR team wants to play them as a 3rd prop.

Just rebrand the u19s to the reserve league, and allow a certain number of overage players to play.
We barely have enough players in the player pool to fill the competitions we have. Having a reserve league would just dilute the quality of the u19s and championship clubs.

I can deny you it, 20 plus years of talking bollox about a new stadium thats no closer yet to even having a spade stuck in the ground does not constitute doing something about it.

Going on teams running a reserve side and teams that say they want to - Wakey, Hull, Halifax, Bradford, Wigan, Saints, Warrington, do the following fixture list (using Wigan as an example)

- Wakey (a)
- Wire (h)
- Bradford (a)
- Hull (h)
- Bye
- Saints (a)
- Halifax (h)
- Wakey (h)
- Wire (a)
- Bradford (h)
- Hull (a)
- Bye
- Saints (h)
- Halifax (a)

Repeat over for 24 games over the year, that’s plenty as you probably won’t want any over Easter as your 1st team squad is usually stretched over that period. Easy, stop making complaints it’s not doable if all teams aren’t running a reserve team.

What you say would be fine, other than Wigan, Warrington and St Helens have said that they'd like to run a reserves team, but because of the lack of other teams they won't be (at least that's how I've read it).

Another poster questioned how a reserves team could be run on £30k. The realistic answer to that is that you probably can't run both reserve and academy teams and have a budget like that. I'm not privy to the numbers, but the Fax reserve team is basically an academy team that's not restricted by age limits. Most players will be on low appearance wages or already signed on for the club on a 1st team contract. The £30k (last I heard was £25k for Fax) will mainly be for the logistics of running the team and other incidentals (coach travel, playing kit etc.).

But I’ve just shown their isn’t a lack of teams to make a full fixture list out of it, they’ll know which teams are running a team and know which want to do from previous SL owners meetings, why can’t these clubs come up with the fixture list I just did?

Why can it only apparently work if you play all other 11 SL clubs home and away once which seems to be what people want with mandatory reserve sides.

If all 12 SL clubs have reserve sides where does that leave the likes of Halifax and Bradford? Not included at the top table as SL clubs can just mirror the reserve fixtures with their 1st team fixtures?

For me it would be great to get a large proportion of SL teams playing a reserve team, it doesn't matter that much in the grand scheme if some don't. But I know Hull have signed extra players to have a squad big enough to run a reserves and when they agreed to come back apparently they were told, as we were, that there was going to be a proper set of fixtures and more teams committing to it and the opposites happened. If the teams like Wigan, Wire & Saints who seem up for reserves committed this season, it would have been at least a good number of games for players that aren't going to make the 1st team and 1st-year players to get game time & thus serve its purpose.

If Wigan, Warrington and Saints join the party then you're right that it makes a viable round robin for everyone. The problem is that those three teams "appear" to be retracting their support for the concept, which leaves the remaining 4 clubs in a pickle.