Quote Mrs Barista="Mrs Barista" I'm pretty certain that had Hull been excluded the first Rovers reaction would have been 'haha curly turds' from grown adults - it's what we do. '"
Of course, many would. Credit to the Wakefield fans I’ve seen for showing more empathy - possibly resulting from them having expected to be the ones getting what they regard as the poopie end of the stick.
Quote Mrs Barista="Mrs Barista" The positioning of the whole process and decision making as uniquely motivated by a corrupt "sicko" Hull fan trying to dismantle Hull KR's youth academy is narcissistic and paranoid IMO given we don't know the content of the submissions.'"
Indeed, but without being very active on social media, I don’t know how representative that is of fan opinion on and off those platforms. My safe guess would be somewhat but not completely. Without condoning it, it doesn’t surprise me that some people have reacted emotionally or even aggressively without knowing the full facts - it is what some do. I condemn anybody calling Dean Andrew a ‘sicko’ or similar. Given his links to Hull FC, and assuming he doesn’t (didn’t
) have similar links to Hull KR, I do think it would have been wise for him remove himself from those discussions. I doubt he’s an idiot and he may very well have done that. If he did, it’d probably be a good idea to gently leak that to the press - to not do so would be taking collective responsibility a bit far imo. Even if he didn’t, highlighting flaws in the process isn’t even half the ‘battle’.
Quote Mrs Barista="Mrs Barista" Whilst it's nice to spread the money thinly for optics purposes I suppose in the end it comes down to the purpose of the academy. Is it to allow more young players to be involved in the game and be affiliated to a professional club, or is it to create a genuine first team pathway for the "elite" in a catchment and optimise their progression? If it's the latter then surely it makes sense to focus resource where it has the best chance of delivering first team player outcomes through the local pool. If you have a poor track record on this, whether through having, say very few homegrown players in your squad or "poaching" players from other catchments, then you can see why decisions have been reached. That's not Dean Andrew's fault, IMO. '"
the current youth development pathways in RL appear very, very inefficient to me - but it depends how you measure it and why clubs or fans want an academy. These tweaks don’t fundamentally change what I think is a broken system and some slightly unhealthy attitudes that arise from it. With a bit of intelligence and imagination, I think that a club that is now free to adopt a different approach could do better by the measures I would use.
Quote Mrs Barista="Mrs Barista" On the stadium it's the obvious thing to blame the Allams, or the council, and we like to do both of course. But it's mostly a useless exercise other than making us feel a little galvanisation. '"
For the reasons ‘Wilf’ has laid out, it is not the the councils fault, IMO. Hull FC are part of the community but are not the community. My parents don’t want to pay more council tax so that a council employee can have the privilege of scraping bird off seats at the KCOM. They don’t know it yet but I shall tell them later. Taking on the risk
of being landed with such responsibility seems imprudent both financially and politically. On the behaviour of the current owners of the SMC, you have my genuine (though impotent) sympathy.
