Quote: Paul Youane "Get rid of the scholarship - leave players with their community clubs until they sign professional with a club. That increases the quality and number of junior teams and avoids players becoming disenchanted with the game if they miss out on scholarship whilst creating a pathway to open age amateur rugby and an affinity with an amateur team, hopefully increasing the numbers playing at that age.
One academy age group at u18's. Avoids three age groups contesting spaces in one team which restricts game time for young players.
Have an u23's or u21's league with say 5 overage players permitted - in effect a reserve league in all but name.
Compulsory running of the two teams for all Super League teams. Abolish dual registration, use the loan system (minimum one month) if you need to.
The recent "reserve" fixtures were generally low quality with Warrington often resorting to borrowing Rochdale's squad players to make up numbers. I seem to recall in the last season we ran a team our match against Wigan was cancelled twice (and never actually played) as Wigan couldn't raise a team!'"
I think the reason we have seen a plunge in the quality of rugby league in the UK is down to the low numbers of school age kids playing the game. Fewer players coming through results in fewer SL quality players at the top of the pyramid. For some time there have been club reports of matches being played with only 13 aside and even a few with 11/12 a side. I think releasing the Scholarship players back to their clubs will help somewhat, but lets remember that they only play 6 competitive games for the U16's during the year anyway. And of course ideally we also want the best quality coaches (Wire ?) overseeing their development if possible such that we at least get the full potential from the smaller numbers that continue to play.
If we had plenty of youngsters we could have U16, U18, U21 and Reserve sides, but we don't. So the problem we face is not really about what age groups we need, it's how do we get more local youngsters playing the game. Until we ( all RL clubs) solve that one we will continue to see 35/36 year old players extending their contracts and more poor quality matches being played out. If the sport fails to hold the interests of the viewing public we could easily see a fall in the Sky monies that underpin the game over here, or as has recently been announced with the Sky cycling team (with Froome and Thomas), Sky could pull out altogether.
