The video on Wigan t.v with Elstone, Lenagan and McManus is well worth watching.

Did anyone else prefer the old league & CC structure with the premiership final at Old Trafford? I was stupidly thinking if the incentive of a premiership final win was to compete in the world club final it might work. Maybe I'm just being old fashioned.

I much preferred the CC Final being in May. It being in August his diluted it somewhat IMHO.

It needs to move imo although May would be difficult with football play offs, FA Cup Final etc. I’d go mid June and then get the rounds spaced out evenly rather then having this ridiculous 8 week gap between the quarters and semis.

He does mention that in the full press release, as well as minimum standards for promoted clubs.

It’s not so much the month but where it is in relation to the season. The Challenge cup was effectively the season finale and the big day out. That has now been replaced with the grand final. Unless we move the CC to the end of the season and return to first past the post I doubt it will ever be as big as it was.

I see your point to an extent but even some years after the Grand Final was introduced the CC Final was still a big occasion. I just think it’s so spread out in the fixtures that they just sneak up on fans who don’t even realise their club are in a CC Fixture. We don’t make enough noise about it or put any real effort into it. I think the RFL sit in Red Hall thinking “its alreet lads, it’s the challenge cup. Be reet”.

If we shift it back to May and make fixtures every month fans aren’t allowed to lose that Cup Magic feeling. The first big event of the season followed by Magic, Internationals, War of The Roses, Grand Final run in.

Sport these days is all about events. Making the sport appealing to casual fans by putting on a show. That’s how darts has done it, the NFL and even Baseball are coming over soon! Bloody baseball! It’s rounders on a larger scale! And don’t get me started on NFL!

How we sit there and take that is beyond me.

We’re too reliant on the dedicated fans who come week in week out rain or shine. But they’re a dying breed. Fans and kids these days rarely go for the love of their team. Fans want entertainment.

If we could market ourselves half decently Sky and other broadcasters would sit up and take note. We’re poor at marketing and we always have been.

We have millions of closet RL fans up and down the country but would they go to a CC Final? Magic? No. It’s not an event. It doesn’t appeal to them. Make it appeal to them, market properly and in advance. Don’t just throw up signs in a bus stop a week before expecting every man and his dog to rock up, like was just done in Newcastle.

I’ve gone off on a tangent a little there

Think it's quite funny the way Hetherington responded first, basically telling the inert Barwick that he needed to say something. And then Barwick jumped to it.

That, in a nutshell, is why we need this new age of SL to kick in as soon as possible, with proper people at the helm.

As a general rule, if Hetherington disagrees with something its usually a good thing

sounds like a cry baby who has had his rattle confiscated!

it's good for the game, new ideas and no blazers in sight!

I prefer that. I do not think the playoff system has delivered on the promise of improving standards by way of a more intense competition. Sure the actual playoff games themselves are intense but there are only three of those. The rest of the season is treated as a precursor to the playoffs and you can get into them losing 13 games (as happened last season). The playoffs reward mediocrity and in my view the standard has gone down not up since we changed system. Contrast that to football in the Premier League where you would be thought of as insane if you suggested a team having lost about 3 times as many games during the regular season as the team at the top should be given another chance to win it. No one seems worried that by about half way the title race is down to about six teams and as the season goes on fewer and fewer teams can win it. Instead of being concerned some team who has lost a shed load of games is out of the running and devising ways to prevent teams who dominate like Man City did last season doing so, City get praised for their football and it's accepted everyone else has to work out ways to stop them next season. In RL many seem to have convinced themselves a team winning it after a poor season demonstrates something positive when in reality all it is is a fluke and gives the impression of a stronger competition when there really isn't one.

Compared to Australia there are far too many games. Ideally, there would be 22 to 26 rounds of league games. The semi-finals in the current format don’t last long enough. In Australia, in both AFL and the NRL, the month of September is the highlight of the year in sporting terms. The GF’s are the cherry on top of an intense month of games and talk off the field too.

If we increase the semi-final series to last 4 weeks, with something like a top 5 or 6 system this would build momentum. The issue then is how to keep the lower teams involved. Parramatta are bottom of the table and their season is over. North Queensland have to win something like 10 of their last 11 games to make the play-offs. There needs to be a reason to play the games played between the bottom teams towards the end of the season.

My idea would be to have a mini-league between 10 and 11 in the SL and 2 and 3 in the Championship. Top two in the mini-league play Super League the next season. The kicker is the results from the games between the team involved in their respective leagues are included. So at the start of the mini-league each team has four games on the board. They then play 4 games to decide. This means they play the two teams they haven’t played home and away. The carryover games mean every game does matter in the SL. If you get flogged in June it could bite you in September if it was against a team that ends up in the mini-league. It would hopefully avoid mid and bottom of the table dead rubbers as they say. The Champions of the Championship are automatically promoted at the expense of the bottom SL team. That way hopefully, the top eight or so teams are battling for the play-offs to get to the GF and the bottom 4 or so teams are battling to avoid relegation and their play offs. In the Championship the 4 or 5 are battling for the mini-league places. This way if someone does run away with the title or is cast adrift at the bottom the teams around them still have something to play for. Also, the teams coming up will have earned their place.

If the CC is moved to the first weekend in May it will avoid the football finals and can still be on a long weekend. We could start in January and have five rounds with the top teams involved coming in at the last 32, not 16 as they do at the moment, and play one round every 4 weeks. The amateur teams might have to cram more in at the start of their season, but it should be do able.

The only issue for me with playoffs to decide who the champions are is that with an even fixture list as we have (one extra fixture at Magic Weekend doesn't affect the table greatly enough) they are unnecessary as with every club under the same fixture schedule the team at the top is clearly the best and should be champions. If you have a league where everyone doesn't play everyone else the same number of times, such as they have in the NRL or as we did have when teams played everyone twice plus 5 teams a third time then you need to use playoffs to redress the balance as an easier or harder set of "extra" fixtures can affect where teams finish on the ladder. So with our current even fixture list system then top of the table should be the champions (though we all know the cash cow that is the GF is here to stay). With the end of the 8s in sight then we could perhaps see a return of the old 27 fixture format (with teams playing 5 teams a 3rd time) this would more justifiably need a playoff structure.

However the same issue with uneven fixture lists affects the foot of the table too so if we have playoffs between the top 4 to decide the title then we should also have playoffs at the bottom to decide who goes down (9th v 12th and 10th v 11th, the winners stay up, losing teams then play each other with loser of that game going down). A ridiculous situation I know and I am not seriously suggesting it.

IMHO you do not need playoffs to decide the champions without a truly uneven fixture list that causes disparity in difficulty of fixtures, but you cannot have such an uneven fixture schedule in a league with relegation (unless you have a ridiculous relegation playoff too). If having P&R, as we are going to, then the fixtures should be the same for all so as not to potentially affect the finishing positions of clubs that could then finish bottom and be relegated due to varying difficulty of fixtures from club to club. So we would then not need to have playoffs to decide who the champions are as there would be no imbalance in fixtures to redress. However there is no chance that the GF will be scrapped despite how unnecessary it is as a method of determining the destiny of the championship.

I think you are spot on there. The point about there being a need for a relegation playoff with an uneven fixture list is a good one. Even then you could end up with the bottom team well adrift despite an easier fixture list and yet they escape by managing to win two games at the end of the season. As you say it will never happen and one reason it won't is the stated objection that with the S8's the four teams in the qualifiers all face the uncertainty of relegation and a relegation playoff just replicates that.

The problem is we have imported the Aussie concept of a playoff system to decide the champions but are wedded to P&R. If we can't bite the bullet and make SL a closed shop as is the NRL so we can have an uneven fixture list delivering sufficient rounds (I don't think SL wil think 23 is enough) then there is no place for a playoff system.

I think the problem is the SL chairmen can't (yet?) bring themselves to admit they really want a closed shop. Their aversion to the qualifiers is based on the fact that relegation threatens four teams not because of the sporting ignominy of failure relegation represents but because it is a financial disaster. One team going down but with criteria placed on the team potentially coming up could be a closed shop in all bar name. That said, we have had this before and it was not popular as it made it possible for a monumentally poor team to survive only for a far better team in a future season to be relegated.