I highly doubt we will be regularly losing if we end up in the championship next season. If we manage to stay in SL then I expect some investment to come in but also a couple of transitional years if we are to progress on the field. There won’t be a magic wand to instantly grab hood finishes in the SL playoffs.

Even though our fan base is at its hardcore support now it is still higher than any championship club and will remain so imho.

If we go down we will have the biggest attendances, amongst the best facilities and I expect the club who can utilise non match day revenue to the most in the league.

If we go down I fully expect us to be winning the 1895 cup and the championship. I expect a season of winning will bring back a good number of fans and get us back over the 4000 mark and beyond.

Does anyone really believe that should we get relegated the club can replicate the ‘98’ season with the entertainment, physicality, togetherness and the personalities that the Grand Final and League Leaders Shield team had?

The Championship is a very tough competition, we have players who’ve never experienced going away to Cumbria on a wet & cold Tuesday evening to face a team of raw boned locals who might not have the skills of St Helens but will scrap for everything and have no respect for the opposition.

It’ll be a very hard season and very difficult to finish in the top four let alone win it

It is much easier to stay in SL if you are already there. To stand a chance from the Championship you will certainly need to win it and hope that one of the 12 SL clubs fail to impress. The decision on promotion will be taken out of our hands and it could be argued that an existing SL squad is better suited than one coming from the Championship, which will need to rebuild.

I firmly believe it yes. Why wouldn’t you?

We will have the highest attendances, sponsorship and revenue of all championship clubs.

We would effectively have a clean slate and be able to like Leigh did build a highly competitive team with likely the highest wage scope from all the championship clubs.

We would be able to retain a core of this years team who would undoubtably ne top championship players.

I have no idea where your defeatist attitude comes from. Everything points that if we are relegated we would have the potential to be the biggest club in that league.

Nobody is saying it would be a doddle but I would highly expect we would be favourites to win the league.

Where's the evidence that we would have the highest fanbase? We barely have a higher fan base than some championship clubs now, and that's before our fans walk away and with reduced away support

Where's the evidence that we would have the highest budget? Leigh have an owner who is happy to spend money on the squad - we haven't.

Are you really sure that the players we will retain are top of the championship level? The gap between the top of the championship and the bottom of super league isn't that much and we've proven time and again that we cannot even complete at the bottom of super league.

Bradford also thought that they'd be the biggest club in the championship, that they still had a super league sized fan base, and that they would come straight back up - look how that has turned out for them

Unless the club sale goes through, the current owners have proven that they are unwilling or unable to invest in the club to compete at the highest level, and unless the new owner puts up a significant investment, there is more chance of us dropping out of the bottom on the championship than there is of being guaranteed to finish top of the league

Hope you are wrong about retaining the core of present team Want 90% of them out

I don't think it's guaranteed we'd bounce back up. I also don't think if Featherstone replaced us IMG would want us, Fev and Cas in the same league.

Again, that isn't how it works

If all other criteria stays the same the points for league position is a ranking average over the last 3 seasons.

So if Sts come top in all three years they are placed number 1 and get 4 points. .

The 4 points for league position are awarded by sorting all the teams across 3 divisions with 0.1 reduction for each team from the top.
So Sts at the top get 4 points. Wigan if second get 3.9 points and so on.
Meaning 11th place gets 3.

This list is ranked as an average over 3 years. So next year's assessment will be judged on last year, this year and next year.

So as we were 10th last year, probably 12th this year a top 1 or 2 will probably average us at 11 or 12 as the teams below Super League won't have the points from previous years.
Leigh finishing so high this year will move them up drastically of course.

So you are right in the sense that a team finishing lower in Championship then winning for one year is harder to get in than a team finishing 11th two years running then finishing 12th.
But that works in our favour right now.

There are other points for performance.
Sts could in theory get another 0.75 and .25 for winning the Grand Final and Challenge Cup in the current assessment season so would end with max of 5.
There are .25 and .1 available for Championship leaders and 1895 winner respectively

So getting good points for stadium and finances etc is massive in the context of promotion back to Super League as performance on the field are really fine margins.

I'll caveat that by saying the 0.1 may be 0.11 after they finalise it but the principle is the same.

When I say core I suspect it would be more like 30/40% and could see a number of changes :

Jowitt
Kershaw
Croft
Eseh
Dagger
Bowes
Smith
Pratt (who’s played almost 10 games for York and going well)

Perhaps one or two of the senior players like Griffin etc but I’d expect there will be a lot of room for recruitment and we would find some from abroad/promoted team etc.

I’d expect for a year to finish top we would run a full time team. Especially so if there’s investment from Ellis. It could end up being a hugely positive year to revive the club.

Well it’s up to us to achieve a higher IMG score than them and Salford, which with the right backing we can.

Up the Trin

I don’t have a defeatist attitude at all, I have a proper sense of realism about how tough the fight for Championship points is going to be. This idea that we’ll be some kind of ‘Championship Man City’ is tinged with more than a bit of arrogance and delusion and smacks of ignorance about how hard that division can be.

Unsurprisingly, the ones who think we will be the most successful team to ever grace the championship with our presence are the same ones who think that Applegarth is the greatest coach in English rugby...

They don't, which is why the grading is stacked against areas with lower populations and lots of clubs. All three Wakefield teams lose a whole point each because you divide the population by the number of tier 1 and 2 clubs in the area

We won’t win many games in the championship either if we persist with Applegarth. We could assemble a Leigh-type squad yet still flirt with another relegation with him in charge. If there’s going to be a clean sweep, start with him.