I mean, who gets crowned (premier league)champions.

It already happens in Europe. I'm talking about the Premier League...it will happen. Rupert wants an end of season showdown, and he'll get it it.

Was Rupert Murdoch running the game in the 1950s because when Warrington won those titles when Brian Bevan was here, they were done under a playoff system.

How many of those games back then meant anything, you could come 8th and get into the playoffs and it was a straight knock out. No wonder Bevan scored so many tries the games must have been meaningless till the end of the season?

It was all about greed and wanting to make money out of the sport. That's what happens when you decide to break away and try and take a beautiful sport like rugby away from its amateur roots and introduce gimmicks purely to make money.

Sure he will.

He'll have to accept though that for any team in the semis or final of the Champions League, they will happily sacrifice "Premiership playoffs" as the Champions League is what really matters at the end of the season.

It would bring some great excitement into the league though because with the likes of United and Chelsea potentially occupied with other things it might open the door for the likes of Arsenal and Liverpool to challenge for the Grand Final.

AND I'D STILL SAY THE SAME THING.

Obviously, you're on another "famous" Sally "wind-up"

Play-off wins (to me) are watered-down.
Bevan played in a league of nearly 30 teams, so it would have been implausable for teams to play each other, home and away. So, a play off system (under those circumstances) is the best you are going to get..

Yes, leagues (nowadays) are set up to be ever so slightly unfair, so that a play off system can be brought in, to justify themselves.

RL has it, because of the extra game at the Magic weekend, hence, an unstable league, so we have to have a play-off system
RU has it, because their teams play on the same weekends as Internationals, when leading team's players have been involved, and have not been able to play for their own club's matches that weekend, so, that justifies their play-off system.

We (as a sport) need to decide what we want. A week-end jamboree, where we all play together (and upsets, ever so slightly, the league format, thus ensuring a play-off system), or a league, which honours it's best team, over a home and away system).

The play-offs (rightly or wrongly) are here to stay. We need to manage them better, though

yes because it cost me £7.50.

Yep, I remember your own fans in 2006 standing there in silence on the West Terrace to express their disgust at having 'stolen' the game from us in the play-offs and progressing despite finishing a good 12 points behind us in the regular season. No one celebrated at all such was the empathy with us at the hooter!
The following season we showed our displeasure at the unfair play-off set up by resting players in all our 8 defeats (and 1 draw) to ensure we only finish 2nd before winning it for the next 3 years. That showed 'em!

We got beat - hammered - last night because we were awful, the play-offs are hardly a factor. There was a lazy petulance about us that needs to be addressed, like Bridge thinking we could score from 5 yards from our own line.

When we get to the last few games of the season i can see us upping the intensity and they will be games worth watching. If coming top was of importance and we needed to win that game last night, Carvell, atkins, hodgson and Briers would have been playing. When we played Leeds early in the season on sky, Jamie peacock in the build up stated that they weren't to bothered if they won or lost. I'm sorry but a clash between two top sides should be a massive game and it wasn't. Fans are paying to watch teams go through the motions in a great number of games. That simply wouldn't be happening in a straight league system.

It matters if you finish fourth. Fourth is the poison position to finish in. You are punished for finishing fourth as you will play the best side in the league in the play-offs. If you lose that bruiser of a game, you have to play a team who finished just one place below you and had an 'easy'[/ much easier] game against the eighth placed side, a warm-up game almost. Finishing fifth is better than finishing fourth!

I think you are right, perhaps we should aim for 5th. .... Leeds seem to have this all sussed don't they ?

The only way to make the league more competitive and create more evenly matched weekly rounds is to reduce the number of clubs in the competition. There is not enough good players available to make 14 team league work

I think if it was really important to win that game then Monas jr, Carvell, Briers, Atkins, Hodgeson and probably Grix and Westwood would all have played and yes, we would have won that game.

We lost because we 'rested' too many key players. We got thrashed because several good players had dreadful games, plus 3 players were returning from months out. It is a result that you get at the extreme end of playing a squad rotation system. More typical would be a 24-20 win or a narrow loss.

It was a depressing game to watch, in fact it was humiliating. But the fact remains that the play-offs do not reward teams that win most of their regular games, it penalises them because they have to use their best players week in week out. At the end of the season you arrive with a team that has lost its edge (or has injuries to key players). Rotation does not guarantee success but it weighs the odds in your favour. Wigan are using the same tactics.

I agree what the fans need to do is send a message by turning up in droves to the league fixtures and not turning up to the playoffs.

Given that the playoffs and especially Grand Final are hugely popular and create a lot of excitement it doesn't exactly send a signal to the game's organisers that it is failing, does it.

They responded to the fact the fans didn't care about the Lancashire v Yorkshire fixtures by scrapping it but to be honest its only Warrington fans, in the last couple of seasons, that have been bitching about the playoffs. Even we were never that bothered up till last year, I don't remember it ever being a topic on this board before.

Mind you I remember "why did we lose to motherclucking Salford" being a topic on these boards before, more or less every year, it's just only this year that we decided we lost to them because we threw the game on purpose because it didn't matter. Of course when it comes to the playoffs you will see a difference because Warrington will take those games seriously there's no danger that we will end up underperforming in the playoffs, that's when we rise to the occasion...

Actually the playoffs, people don't turn up to watch. The final is a final which always attracts a bigger crowd.

The way this will be resolved will be through simple supply and demand, no need to worry.

Given the premise, as the league games decline in importance, then fans will stop buying season tickets despite better grounds. If they decide that their team are not going to play at the top of their game for enough games on the season, they will just turn up like the players for big fixtures and leave the rest to TV or read the results on the net.

If crowds do decline for regular rounds, clubs will feel this in their pockets as actually clubs as financial bodies have very little interest in the playoffs as it does not add as much to the revenue as 13 weekly rounds.

If clubs feel it in their pockets, big clubs through fewer season tickets, smaller through less away fans turning up.

Then their chief execs who make the rules for SL, will then change said rules.

Preaching to the converted here.

We could reduce the number of teams, we could also by default reduce teams income, and potential sponsorship by reducing the number of games. This would ruin the 4 teams kicked out but that's by the by. for me the fact we can;t produce 14 teams of 13 players without having second rate players or imports to top the teams up is the single biggest embarrassment rugby league has.

How about this for a radical idea - Why not invest in coaching better coaches at amateur and club junior levels, to make them better and give them the skills to regularly produce enough talent to fill 14 clubs, and not have to supplement our squads with overseas players and second rate e. who knows we may even be able to produce 17 from that lot who can do alright against other countries.