Ive stood in Wilderspool on many occasions with only 3000 other people there after 100 years-enjoy your luck of having Moran on board-without him the council would have seen you down the drain with the debts and derelict stadium

Oh dear....you missed the last bit...away fans don't count on the licence application. Oh, 5,000+ miles with 9 games away confirmed on Friday nights...so days off work as well as all the other logistical nightmares like trains all apparently being solar powered north of Watford.....ie...they stop running when the sun goes down


The point you were referring to was the ground, not the atmosphere or crowd numbers....please pay attention. As for finance, we are both in trouble if the sugar daddies get bored or burnt.


CURRENT......means recent...you know, last 2 or 3 seasons. With 100+ years of history I would expect you to have loads of England international players...but a bit thin on the ground at the moment wouldn't you agree?




...and as I said, it ALWAYS comes down to fans......

Feel free to reply, but unless you are going to disprove my point, which you basically just endorsed with your first reply, I wouldn't bother.

Good luck for the rest of the season...I am sure this will be THE year

Just for the record,would you care to disprove the points made in this particular section of my post?

Your points are ridiculous and so far wide of the mark that they do not warrant a reply. I grew up in the South and played Rugby Union. I didn't come across a single person who "loathed" League. In fact, most really enjoyed it; my mates would always watch the games on the TV, and when training, we would often play modified League rules. When playing for Maidstone, there would be people strolling around the clubhouse wearing RL shirts. One of my mates who played at quite a high level for Kent RU played League in the summer. Some of Maidstone's players turned out for Kent Ravens (who are sadly no more).

There is a huge amount of animosity towards RU on these forums - e.g. only 1 thread in RU is allowed because a large proportion of the people on this site, based in the North, can't stand it. I know of RL fans on here who hate the sports too, for historical reasons and for the fact that it is awful.

I think you've disproved a couple of points yourself. Firstly you say Londoners "loathe rugby league with a passion", then you say most of them don't even know the team exists which suggests complete indifference, not passion.

Obviously the immediate area of Greater London in which Quins play is a union stroghold, but London isn't "a rugby union town" it's a football town. Maybe you were unlucky to encounter a few idiots in the Westherspoon's? I've drunk in there plenty of times myself; they've often had RL games live on the television in there, and union fans often ask about our team and how we did. The general feeling I get from union fans is of a passing interest without being keen enough to get hooked, which pretty much mirrors my own feelings towards union.

The only hostility I recall on a matchday came in a pub in Putney when a moronic Fulham FC fan made some snide remarks as a couple of us walked past him in quins shirts, but i suspect he'd mistaken us for union fans in any case.

I'm not arguing with a couple of geezers darn sarf. You say I don't warrant a reply but go on to give one? Face facts. Professional rugby league in london never has worked in the past,isn't working now and is highly unlikely to work in the future. The stoop should be packed to the rafters every home game to watch quins play the likes of leeds,saints,warrington,wigan..........but it isn't. So one of two things is happening. Either your marketing team is absolutely abysmal and should be sacked on the spot or(and this is much more likely)the people of london just are not interested. They have been brought up on rugby union and football and just as union would never be the main sport in warrington,league will never be the main sport in the london area.

Thank you for quoting me incorrectly. I did not say "londoners"(as in the whole of london) loathe league with a passion,I was making reference to the twickenham locals. Football and union fans who expressed a deep rooted dislike of RL,to myself,in person. Others as I have said earlier when told we were there for the harlequins V warrington match asked questions about quins RU. So they had no idea quins had a RL team,and were quite surprised when told that quins have a league side at the stoop too.

Almost certainly true, but so what? do we just give up then, and why is it an issue to you?

There is a growth of playing juniors now right across the South East that did not know the game existed 10 years ago, without some kind of Premier club [does not have to be QRL] playing the sport to act as an incentive, why will they bother in the future?

It's not an issue to me and never will be. I would like to see you do well,but doubt it will happen. A couple on here dismissed my comments as wide of the mark but you partially agree with me,so is it you and I that are reading the situation wrongly or is it others who are choosing to ignore something that is basically whacking them in the face?

Either or neither, your choice, point is that others may be trying to make is a simple one, in terms of how to market the sport [not the club] to a massively wide different cultured audience who do not have the sport in their collective psyche is always going to be a major challenge, but not one to give up on.

With direct regards to marketing to the transient Antipodean market it has been tried many times with various success and no doubt will continue to be tried to some extent, but the issue is that there is no one size fits all solution and that can only be one part of the strategy. A lot of Aussies simply will not travel out from Shepherds bush to Twickenham to see what in their eyes [those who even like league, not all do don't forget] is an inferior game to the one they know back home played by players they have either never heard of, or were in the Jim Beam cup last time they looked. Part of the whole only.

The only proven keys are [1] stability, which we are now beginning to get after the nomadic trawls around London [2] community spirit to mirror what the sport means to those areas up North which embrace it as part of their heritage [3] success in some measure, but at least a competitve spirit on the field to make those who are trying the water, want to come back for more.

And at the moment on point 3 we are failing miserably.

Any strategy to get people to come that first time has been tried and some need to be forgotten and others tried again, but whether it's "named" dancers or singers, Irish, Aussies, football supporters, tube travellers, Union supporters et al, we need to understand that if they don't know and love the game they will not come to love it unless they see the best there is on the field week in week out, and the ever decreasing circle is that without more bums on seats, paying more into the club to enable that outcome, we struggle to progress.

Still say though does that mean we should just give up?

Sack the marketing department? We've only just got one!

Crowds seem to be the only arguement that you keep on returning to.....(see my other posts). Apart from attendances we scored points for our licence and are in SL on merit.

Yes, we may well finish last this year, the first time that will of happened in the SL era and yes, we are thankful that there is no relegation, but you miss the point. We fielded 5 Cockneys against you....that's 5 guys who were knee high to a grasshopper when SL started. 5 guys who have made a decision to play the game rather than Union or soccer. Do you think that those 5 guys, or LMS sitting in the RFL naughty Chair would be playing League if Quins/London Pro RL didn't exist? The project that is london RL is working.....just no quickly enough for your liking.

And there lies the rub! We went down the journeyman aussie route and got blasted for that....now we have a more british squad than anyone else in the comp and because we aren't immediately competitive, we get blasted for that........I suspect we could win the double, the WCC and everything else with a team all born in Mile End Hospital and SOME POSTERS would still find fault with us

Your own words"Finally,if your club is doing as well as you claim across the board,why can't you attract larger crowds? One reason maybe is that you have always played in a union stronghold(london)where league is viewed as the enemy."[/i

So we're "loathed with a passion" only in Twickenham, but merely "viewed as the enemy" London-wide? I wouldn't have said there was a world of difference there. Either way I don't believe it's true. Lack of interest and publicity, or more pertinently the range of alternatives on offer, is the main problem but I've never felt anyone either in London as a whole or specifically just Twickenham was actively wishing us to fail.