Spot on. The had a home game vs Leeds final week of the regular season to get up to 9th spot and on paper a better fixture list for the Middle 8's....they lost. The had home games vs Leigh and Hudds, just one win would've been enough....they lost both. They had home advantage vs Salford in the MPG.....they lost.

4 winnable home fixtures to save themselves and they failed every time. The system is being called harsh because players could lose jobs but it presented them with numerous do-able chances to avoid it.

Top 4 of middle 8s are in SL the following year bottom 4 aren't no need for million pound game.

It still doesn't resolve the disparity between the super 8's and middle 8's formats.

Best post yet. The MPG might provide great sporting moments but it's unnecessary and celebrates mediocrity. Well, not even mediocrity - Salford fans were, rightly, celebrating but celebrating what? Not promotion, not winning a trophy just being slightly less crap than some other teams. Scrap it.

All clubs know at the start of the season that they have 30 games to avoid the MPG and therefore, a potential relegation, every team in super league knew this, and won enough games to avoid it, One team didn't! not fair? but neither is life.
As others have said, it's sport, Hull KR knew the deal before a ball was kicked in february.

You see teams in football celebrate avoiding the drop on the final day all the time, it's actually provided some of their most talked about moments in fact.

Because it wouldn't be rewarding the likes of Hull who did so well to be top after 23 Rounds to just turn around and say you're now only 2 points ahead of Widnes and Wakey. Would be going backwards in rendering the opening 23 rounds meaningless and teams guaranteed a top 4 spot by Round 17/18 can just sit back for several rounds. Teams will start resting players thinking they'd rather have a fresh team and accept a mere 2 points to make up. It's up to those teams in 6th/7th/8th to make sure they aren't out of reach of the top 4 come 23 rounds, it's what Hull did differently from last year and they kept their foot down even when it was obvious they had a top 4 spot.

As for the middle 8's it's obvious why points can't carry over as you can't start with Leigh on 40 odd points and HKR on 14. The advantages given out are in the form of extra home games and facing your trickier opponents at home rather than away. Leeds and Hudds unexpected involvement in the Middle 8's mixed that up a bit this year but the format/reward for what fixtures you get in the 8's is fine.

It's not as bad as the 'Championship Shield' and seeing Bradford celebrating that yesterday. My word.

Well, my team continue to break records. Recently we've had....

First team to get nilled at Wembley by the largest margin.
First team to go undefeated in their respective Super 8s league (last year).
First SL club to be relegated via the Super 8s format.

I love my club but there are times.....

You Wigan, Saints etc supporters don't realise how easy you've got it supporting your clubs.

Anyway, onwards and back upwards. (hopefully)

We may not have voted for the current system but we knew what could happen. We were the worst team over the course of 27 games and deserve everything we got. The supporters knew after 6 or 7 games that we were in trouble and we needed to strengthen but we decided to stick with what we had to get us out of the mess. It didn't work and now we are relegated. Personally I can see another 10 years plus absence from SL as I don't believe any team is going to be as poor next year as some of the SL sides in the qualifiers this year.

On a side note, I can see a big dip in the SL crowds for next year unless Leigh can start averaging 7-8 per game to make up the drop from us being relegated. It also means I can cancel my Skysports subscription as we will only get maybe 1 game next year if we finish in the top 4 of the championship.

Rovers fan here. The MPG is awful. Relegation would be more acceptable if we'd finished bottom of the pile after 30 games. To finish 4th in the Middle 8s when there are 4 Super League places up for grabs and then have to play a one off game against a team who performed worse and finish below us in the format is quite hard to take.

You're right, it happens quite often but, it doesn't happen in a contrived fixture that the puts the 2 clubs (one of which gains promotion and another who faces relegation and possibly worse) directly against each other.

Occasionally, very occasionally, you end up with a "freak" fixture where this scenario happens by chance and there is just as much at stake (Wakefield v Cas in the "original" MPG) and thats fine, it happened and couldn't be avoided. However, the idiots running the game should have left it there.

Imagine if this game was Hull FC v Hull KR, Wigan vs Saints or Warrington v Widnes

Although this is very, very unlikely, the rivalry, with so much at stake, would lead to difficulties afterwards and by contriving the fixture, the RFL themselves would have to accept some responsibility.

The weekends game didn't matter because it was your club involved (and probably never will be) but, it doesn't take a genius to realise that this set of circumstances massively increases the risk of crowd trouble and yes, KR, as the host club, have to accept some responsibility for the poor stewarding but, the fixture isn't needed.