It was 1994-95, and there weren't 10 "promotion places", any more than London Broncos "earned" the 11th "promotion place" by finishing 4th in the old 2nd Division (ie 20th overall).

But why let a few facts get in the way of the usual revisionist bollox eh?

The point of the post was that the criteria for obtaining a place in Superleague currently do not necessarily include winning a championship and therefore such a feat would justify nothing. Having fulfilled the current on-field criteria (i.e. NRC cup win) the Widnes club appear to have chosen to attempt to fulfill the other current criteria for SL membership in order to "justify" their place should it be awarded.

Also I believe the majority of Widnes fans problem with the last decision was that they felt (rightly or wrongly) that their club better fulfilled the criteria put forward than the ones who were awarded a franchise and was nothing to do with whether they had succeeded on the pitch or not.

Clearly Talent Spotter is a troll who starts these threads to wind up Widnes folk, now if i started a regular thread about any number of clubs poor attendances surely the threads would be locked?

No, there weren't as you well know.

Any luck in getting the right date yet btw? Or does the history re-write now include putting everything back by a year?

1) Possibly. The way to deal with trolls, though, is to ignore them. However, attendances are a perfectly legitimate and regular subject of discussion on the Sin Bin (see numerous threads on Quins, Crusaders, Wakefield, Huddersfield, Salford, etc, etc [ipassim[/i.

2) No they wouldn't. See 1.

The 12 places in SL didn't go to the top 10 in Division 1, plus London and Paris then? The thing that annoys me about the rewriting of history to claim that Widnes were denied their 'rightful' place in SL at the start by a stitch up is that it totally ignores, eg, Featherstone, who finished 11th and are the club who actually would have got a place in SL if 2 hadn't been reserved for Paris and London. Not that I think they'd have been any more successful than Workington Town, mind.

Not a troll, but anytime Widnes get a good crowd/away following etc all we hear is what fantastic fans they are, so when they get a poor crowd I like to expose this myth.

I thought you said you were taking a break , he's not fallen out with you has he

Wheres the push bike I asked for when I was 10?

How typical of you to ignore the truth of the situation, as described in my earlier post. This IS the history, NOT a re-write. The 10 places were NOT a condition at the outset of that year. How can they be described as 'rightful' places? They werent decided upon by a vote of the clubs, or in fact by any fair means. If Wigan had been in 11th, do you think they would have been jettisoned? The places were decided upon on a whim, and even changed on the morning of the decision. For heaven's sake, Maurice Lindsay called our chairman to tell him we were in, then a couple of hours later did the same and said we were out! Hull and Wakey were similarly ditched but in less ridiculous fashion.

Listen to what you are being told by people who know what happened, rather than ignore the posts you dont like just in order to keep banging on with rubbish like that above. Rightful places... there WERE none.

I brought her with me but she took one look at you sleeping and fled.

in that case there was none denied to Widnes and we can all move past this petty point scoring.

You're more than 10 years old?



It's true that the clubs didn't know in advance that SL was on the way and so they didn't know how important their eventual league placings would be. The exact opposite in fact. The initial SL announcement was made in early April when there were still several rounds of league games still to play. At that juncture relegation became irrelevant and league placings academic (so we all thought!). I recall that Widnes fielded weakened sides over that remaining period because several of the more experienced players were carrying knocks and/or were due contract bonuses dependent upon appearances. The Chemics lost all 5 (or was it 6?) of the post-announcement games.

The phone call from Maurice Lindsay that you mention was on Good Friday, 14 April, confirming that Widnes would take the place of Toulouse in SL 1. At this stage some of the other clubs were still slated to merge. You're wrong when you say that this decision was reversed a few hours later. In fact what happened was that there was a meeting of the clubs some time after the end of the league season (May Day bank holiday rings a bell) when all merger proposals were scrapped and a vote determined that SL would be comprised of the top 10 in the table plus London and Paris.

I don't know what all of the above proves or disproves in the context of the rest of the thread (which I haven't read) but after the passing of 15 years I suspect the answer is 'nothing'. However that's how it happened - more or less.