Quote: DaveO "Where it will potentially fail is what happens after the split IMO. The bottom 8 is a pointless competition. The middle 8 only has value (though I am not sure that is the right word) by engineering a false position whereby the fourth placed side who could have never lost a game to those below them faces a sudden death "£1m" game to decide their SL future. There is the clear hope from the RFL that regardless of how much better as a team or how well run as a club the 4th placed side is, they will fall victim to a spate of injuries or bad refereeing to ensure there is movement between the divisions. Anything to ensure a relegation occurs to justify the move to 8/8/8.
Both the middle and bottom 8 represent a failure as far as the season goes for the teams that end up in them and the Swiss found when they tried this in soccer sponsors, fans and TV audiences were not interested in watching or sponsoring teams who were in a lower tier.
Trying to engineer the failure of a team in this way via deliberately setting up a one off game is pathetic and a clear indictment that they have failed to get the lower league teams up to standard to compete in any other way. That one game is also the only game of any real interest and compared to what is going on in the top 8 the lower two 8's are a sideshow.
Not putting this job out for applications, not putting the TV rights out to tender and coming up with this 8/8/8 system are all symptomatic of an organisation well past its sell by date in term of those running it IMO.
Nigel Woods has come up with some hair brained ideas in the past including a point for whoever was leading at half time and some sort of reward for scoring more than 12 points in the last 1/4 of the game even if you were losing IIRC (not sure if that was a league point or not). When he came up with these ideas he was in no position to put them into practice. The 8/8/8 and these other failings is what you get when people like him are allowed the keys to the kingdom without the threat of having any pressure of being replaced.'"
I don't really get where you're coming from with this £1m game stuff. The middle 8 is effectively a mini league where teams need to make the top 4 to survive so surely most games will matter. If it all ends up coming down to the result of one game putting a Championship club up then it's because the team did well enough to get into that position. Of course it's open to a bad ref call, injuries, bounce of a ball etc but that's only the same as the play offs and many other relegation systems.
If this system is engineering the failure of a team you must hate the football system. 3 teams are guaranteed to be relegated from the Premier League next year, none are guaranteed to be relegated from Super League.
I'm looking forward to next year and think it will be a vast improvement with regular season games being far more important and teams 5-8 being pushed to properly catch up with 1-4 instead of just hoping they can come good in a game or two the play offs. Likewise teams 9-12 will be pushed to make the top 8 to get big games at the back end of the season and avoid the prospect of releflgation. Championship teams also incentivised by the possibility of making the Super League
