Have you not seen David Howell play this season?

He is a good player. I was talking about the likes of Williamson and Robinson - adequate but not worthy of a quota spot.

But many others don't and many others are also realistic enough to understand that there was little if any choice left in 2005, it still boils down to do you want to watch top level RL in London or not.



1 You get the players your budgets allow, who can honestly say they have not had a downer on one or more players in the squad in any given season, even in the '97 season I can remember players getting bagged, however we don't tend to make scapegoats of them like other clubs supporters do.

2 What are the quota allowances for these "exciting foreign players", who is going to fund them and most importantly, who are they?

3 No disagreement about Sundays.

4 Footie fans. Not sure about this, it's been debated millions of times that just because a person likes one type of sport doesn't mean en-bloc that they all do, target them [my view would be lower leagues and non pro by all means with whatever deals you want, but not convinced the numbers would increase by that much, and squaring the circle slightly.............if we cannot perform well on the field then they will not return anyway.



If it is based upon the supposed published criteria then yes we will get a licence, whether or not we can keep a club going by relying on DH to fund it is another issue. My own view is that the only way this sport & this club, will increase in popularity and size is by organic growth of the love of the game via the community surrounding it and that means taking what we are as QRL and living with it.

Why respond in a language he doesn't understand. You can't reason with him as in his world, he would see us fill the team with Australians and pi55 off our partners in the other code.
Simply put Rupe1....your model was tried for 11 years and failed....big time.
As I have said, do us all a favour.......stop posting until you can offer a solution as well as a misguided opinion!

Whilst at Charlton when known as the Broncos we brought in some big name players, we played some pretty adventurous rugby, at times, in the latter days as the Broncos. Our crowds were still poor. The crowds remain poor as Quins and as such we now have to cut our cloth very carefully whilst recruiting.

There are clearly a small number of people who will not watch the club whilst we are called Harlequins. However that number is nothing compared to the number who have no idea that there are two codes of rugby or that there has been a troubled past between the two codes. As Quins we do have a name / brand with a high recognition factor, as Broncos it's back to most of London thinking I watch American Football. I wish I believed something as simple as changing our name would be all but a cure all to our numerous problems but I just don't think it would be.

The simple fact is that the future for fully professional RL in London is far from secure and would be irrespective of whether we were called London Broncos or Harlequins. The issues the club needs to surmount go far deeper than that.

Incidentally whilst our gates have stayed roughly similar for the past decade or so I don't agree that this means we have few lapsed fans. Rupe1 is correct, we have many however I suspect his diagnosis as to why most are lapsed is erroneous. Towards the end of his time Nic Cartwright said what % of our season ticket holders did not renew when we moved from Charlton to Brentford, it was incredibly high. Presumably they didn't fancy travelling across London every other weekend. Would those people now start hauling over to West London if we were called London Broncos??

H of t'e...whilst I agree with most of what you have said, for 10 years (forget the first 4 years as they were the novelty years and look at the mighty Monarchs now) we have remained static. In these years I believe that we have retained a hard core 1,000 and through child birth etc...added another 500. At that rate of natural progression, we would put Wakey and others to shame in 100 years time, but alas, we are now a business and therefore we have laid out our stall and we are HARLEQUINS RL. This is the only point that rupe1 and his posse keep harping back to...the RU tie in. Well guess what. Given that RL had a 100+ year head start on the professional front, which code generates more revenue and pays its stars more money nowadays?......rupe1 lives in a past when we still had mines and beer was 1/2p a pint

Mines a pint, too!

I think that's it in a nutshell. All for new ideas but suck it up on the old ones !!

The only people doing a dis-service to the game are those who claim to support RL but dont come and watch the only pro RL team in the South East for some half-baked, miserable over analytical reason. Quit moaning and support the game. You dont have to be 100% behind every part of it, but a succesful London side would be huge for RL and it won't happen if people don't turn up.

Exactly

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