Hardly! I'd have given anything to be having a season like Bradford's back then. No one gave a flying about us at that time, so I'm sorry but crybaby posts about a poor season in super league don't wash with me.

It's this 'not where we deserve to be' mentality thats probably landed them where they are.

to be honest, "bankrolling" a club can be swapped with decent financial management, Hull FC are the perfect examples of this, with record breaking merchandise sales even with the horrendous seasons we have been enduring, so i think that the tag of a wealthy owner bankrolling clubs because otherwise they would be insolvent, is a tad over dramatic

There's little chance of the Bradford players stepping up and stopping the rot when according to the voice they hear at training every day it's never their fault when they lose.

Victim mentalities are only useful when you use them as motivation (see Sir Alex Ferguson) not when you use them as an excuse for defeats.

It's simple....these players were with Quins...we were rubbish. Then we sold them and Bradford brought them....now Bradford are rubbish!! hehe

Why would they want him? A scrum half who only looks good behind a dominant pack and has a decent kicking game and little else? Two very vanilla half-backs at Odsal now, doesn't appear to be a spark of creativity there.

According to a lot of posts on here, the kicking game which made up for Deacon's lack of pretty much everything else, has gone too. I read that Jeffries is linked with Crusaders?

The bail out by the RFL and new ground built by the ratepayer had nothing to do with it I take it. Its easier to reach high when your already helped half way up the ladder.

On this issue, I suggest your argument is irrefutable.

In any case, quite a few black and white fans are far from happy with the financial management of their club, as evidenced on their forum.

Even so, as I said earlier regarding clubs being more equal than others, shît happens; we have to live with it.

I think that's the root cause of the situation Bradford find themselves in. The succession was all nicely set up and all McNamara had to do is keep "quality in the joint" as Jack Gibson once said and allow things to tick over.

Whether it was McNamara or Caisley's decision to restrict spending I don't know, but whoever it was is responsible for Bradford being 12th.

Cannot argue with that

It was neither.

Under the Caisley regime the club was spending far more than it could afford. Don't take my word for it...the figures to prove it are all in the public domain if you know how to read a set of accounts.

But so were a number of other clubs a few years ago, especially Saints - and on an even bigger scale in a number of cases, especially in the early years when the Bulls were using most of the new-found income from Sky to develop the club's marketing and other infrastructures instead of splashing out on huge transfer fees and silly salaries. And indeed a good number of clubs still are spending well beyond their means.

The difference was that Caisley (who owned about a quarter of the Bulls - unlike most other clubs the Bulls have not had a single controlling shareholder) did not put in personal megabucks the way the likes of McManus, Moran, Wilkinson, Davy, Whelan, Lenaghan and to an extent Caddick did. Therefore there was no sugar daddy to make good the cash effect of the losses. Eventually reality had to set in. Form your own views about the circumstances and timing of Caisley (and then Noble) leaving, and of course the Fielden transfer.

Add to this a coach who seemed pretty effective when given the funds to buy in players and not develop players in-house, but pretty lost once that crutch was taken away, and the picture starts to become rather more clear.

McNamara appears to have inherited a poisoned chalice of a role, where the club had much less to spend than under his predecessor, and the academy system and youth development was seemingly nearly shot. Anyone who attended the recent Fans' Forum will know all about this. Indeed, McNamara has spent a large part of his time and effort in rectifying the near-fatal academy/development situation he inherited - with promising results for the future now.

Add in too the caution not to assume that the salary cap represents the total of what the players at a club receive, or is directly comparable between clubs. It depends also very much on things like the proportion of a player's package (especially overseas ones) which a club thinks it can justify in paying in non-PAYEable form, and the ability of a player (cos it can't be the club...) to secure payment for his image rights from an "unconnected" third party. And that assumes every club has been making complete and accurate salary cap declarations, of course. Some of these matters are subject to current investigation by HMRC and the RFL, and while certain clubs are seemingly pretty worried, I have it on strong authority that Bulls are not amongst them. Maybe that has some bearing on comparing squads between clubs? - whatever.

But taking all this lot together, it seems to me altogether unfair to blame the current regime for responsibility for all the (hopefully

temporary) decline that we have seen.

That said, its still hard to see how any of the above explains the repeated capitulations in defence we have seen time after time this year. You just sit and wait for it to happen - and that against Cas was totally and utterly unacceptable and I for one have totally lost patience with it now.

Thing is, as Caisley's reign came to an end, there was nothing left to spend.

In his latter years money got tight and, as he believed success could be sustained and didn't come in cycles, any money we did have available was channelled to the first team.

As money became harder to come by, and playing rules changed which meant that way of thinking had become outdated, Caisley's ways were "found out" and that and the Harris fiasco led to him going.

Which isn't to defend McNamara in any way because, although he hasn't had the easiest job in the game, he hasn't made a particularly good fist of it with the first team.

It should be a lesson for any club board who think "money is getting tight so let's skimp on the youth side of things", but that will always remain an easy option.