But RL didn't sign many/any of the graduates - the lawyers, doctors and professionals of the rugby union social set. It signed the working men - especially from Wales - who played union because it happened to be the game they played in thier town. The people who play and follow union in Leeds and Wigan are generally different - there, it always was a social class issue - but the Geordies and Welshmen and Devonians and Midlanders who played union did so in preference to football, not simply because they went to grammar school.

Union killed the expansion of League by banning anyone who went near a league club. Union was a social institution as well as a game - a social club that people aspired to be part of, and joined in with to 'get on' in businessness and society. But Union was, also, always a game, with its ideals of expansive beauty and rugged bravery.

I agree with your position - I thought it was crap, to play and to watch. But that was then. It's different now.



Union is nothing like that now, Frank. Granted, crowds at SL are significantly better than at the RU Premiership, and crowds in the Championship are better than those in the Union 2nd tier.

But Union has become much more open and attractive, played in good stadia with string branding and logos and flashy kits, in front of passionate and knowledgeable and dedicated fans. Walk around Gloucester - rugby shirts are more common than footy shirts. Walk around Exeter - Chiefs are as prominent as Exeter City. The biggest sporting clubs in Leicester, Northampton and Bath are the union teams, playing week in, week out, in full grounds to mad-keen speccies.

Union has also had massive problems in its club game. Internationals are a mainstay of the union scene, but its led to outright war between clubs and country. Union clubs, in the professional era, have not known how to manage money or budgets, and some famous names have gone to the wall. Other clubs in their de-facto franchise top division have moved away from, and have no connection to, their traditional fan base. In comparison, the way the RFL has looked after its elite game is a model of good management, compared to the infighting and disasters that union has gone through.

Union, perhaps by its very nature, is not so open in dissent and criticism. It is an establishment sport, whereas we have always been the rebels., so perhaps it’s natural that we complain more about hierarchy than they do.

But the relationships between fans and their club, and between clubs and their governing body, are very much like those in RL.




Rubbish. We didn’t win a single test match against Australia from 1978 to 1988, and we barely won a series against the Kiwis. We even lost to France and Wales when playing as England. We scored one try in three tests in ’82, we were so far off the pace.

Superleague started in 1995. Our overall record against the Kiwis is good, we’ve won individual tests against the Ozzies (and aside from the Centenary game it’s always been a contest), and we’ve never lost to a minor nation.

In terms of poaching our best talent, who?? Ashton and Myler from England. That’s about it. Lee Smith and Chav Walker came back. Vainakolo and Hape aren’t English (in our game, at least). There’s been a few high profile players – Toquiri (back), Rodgers and Sailor in Oz, Williams in NZ, Farrell and the Paul brothers (who came back). But not enough anywhere to make a difference. It’s much harder to go from league to union, as there are so many more technicalities and diverse elements to their game.

Given that Union has a world international scene, vast reserves of money, a pan-European club game, and a huge social network to draw upon - TFFT, I say.

Where we have suffered is in the loss of a generation of coaches – Edwards, Ford, Larder, Steadman, Lydon, Kevin Ellis, Clive Griffiths, Aldred, Darbyshire, etc etc.

The danger from union is not losing top league players, it’s losing the next generation of kids to union. If we don’t expand, we won’t just stand still… nobody’s interested in provincial sports. Lacrosse is massive in Stockport, and so what? You might as well support bog-snorkling. RL has to be national, or it will not be funded and supported in its heartland programmes.

The government is about to announce that Local Authorities will lose the lead role in setting schooling priorities. In other words, if you’re not on a national agenda, you won’t be on local agendas. Union is, as you say, a national sport. If league isn’t also a national sport, the junior game will vanish from the school agenda, and then, more slowly, from the community game at junior level.




Our game has not sold out to one sponsor. That’s rubbish, as I’ve posted elsewhere – but it is remarkable that our sport signs a £45 million tv deal and regards it as a disaster that a one commercial partner should value us so highly. BSkyB is our largest commercial partner, but makes up less than half of the RFL’s revenue, and that’s ignoring all the (independently-controlled) income to the clubs from ticket sales, club merchandising, sponsorship, and other revenue streams.

We massively underrate our own sport. SL gets much bigger audiences, live and on tv, than the RU premiership. The NRL is the most-watched rugby competition in the world, with almost double the viewing figures of the (second best) Super14 (even though that spans three rugby-mad nations). Championship RL gets much bigger crowds than Championship RU, and is the only second-tier rugby competition televised. The Challenge Cup is far and away the biggest club rugby knockout competition in the world.

Competition DOES promote and reward excellence. Wembley and Old Trafford were sold out, and there were four different finalists. SL attendances were great this year. Any team can beat any other team, and there’s at least five teams that could win the whole lot.

But we’ve been competing for 2 years to make a Grand Final or a Northern Rail Cup triumph, remember? Our failure to make the top division is not because of off-field considerations... we didn't even get to that stage. In simple competition, we just didn't perform at the necessary level in the crucial matches.





But that’s not the alternative we’re faced with. Amateur RL in Devon has grown organically and locally. Partly because of that, the RFL has been given £29.4m from Sport England to grow the game. That money hasn’t come from the SL clubs or the Championship, and hasn’t been diverted from the heartlands – it has been given specifically for national development.

The South West’s ‘share’ of that £29.4m is pretty small (the smallest in England) – not more than £200k over 3 years – but it was in the bid for the funds. No SW development would have meant the grant was £200k smaller.

The same is true in the North East, London and the South, and the Midlands. The money to develop the game in those regions is extra, not taken out of the heartlands.

And that is the point about development and expansion – about Crusaders and Quins, and Skolars and Scorpions, and Bristol Sonics and Peterlee Pumas and Nottingham Outlaws and Coventry Bears and Medway Dragons.

As the RL world gets bigger, so it brings in new players who would never have been part of the game. It brings in new money, from Sport England, and schools, and local councils, and sponsors, and club members, that would never have been part of the game.

The world is massively different now than it was even when I started watching the game.

Then, we were a small but doughty northern sport, sponsored by beer and fags. We were on national telly, but as a provincial joke, look at the funny northerners with their flat vowels and their mud.

Now, we are a genuinely national sport, albeit not very deep in the majority of areas. Our lead sponsors are major national (and some international) brands (Gillette, Co-op, Irn-Bru, Engage, Carnegie). We’re on both terrestrial and satellite telly. Our internationals are all screened live. Division 2 is on tv every week, SL has 2 live games on Sky and a highlights show on the Beeb. The Cup Final is a flagship event.

Yeah, it was sad, this weekend, to see a lad born with a pie in his mouth going the length at Twickers, and being described as ‘the Northampton man, Chris Ashton’.

But the weekend before I was watching a bloke born and raised in Kent, scoring four tries for England Rugby League.

Go figure.

Just to put that in context.

Last weekend the guy who started Medway Dragons, Martin Coyd, came from Kent to speak to a meeting in the South West (a 200 mile drive, btw).

Medway is on the Thames estuary on the southern side of the river, deep in Kent. It's a poor, run down area, and is basically a garrison town that the Navy has left, but it's not far from leafy and rich countryside.

Medway Dragons RL started in 2006. It runs a season from March to August. It runs teams from under 8 to under 18 (its first open age team will start next summer). It has a girls team at u12, a wheelchair team and a masters team. It is a clubmark gold club.

This is Kent, remember.

Martin started the club because his son Tom wanted to play RL. Tom Coyd is now in the Quins u15s team. But Martin's planning timeframe..?

The goal, from the outset, has been that Tom Coyd will bring his kids to the club in 20 years time.

Where will Leigh Centurions be in 20 years time? Is anyone even thinking about that? Because they are in Kent. Because they are in Bristol. They are in Leeds and Wigan and St Helens. They are at Leigh East.

Well I have read your response and you make some valid points and some I am not in agreement with.

I shall give it some thought and reply later but I am going to have a nap first because I have got up too early today' and' then I need to go to the gym as I am on a water metre and a limited income.

I lived in the Medway area (Rainham) in the early 80's, in my high school League was a dirty word, plus that was the time Kent Invicta was playing in Maidstone and lasting only one season.

Jeff

rlhttps://www.medwaydragons.com/rl