May be worth its own thread this one.

Just been confirmed on the official site (are they on the ball - or what?) that our 18s are in the top group for the second phase of the season. Fantastic news and what a boost for the licence application.

With regard to Leigh schloarship, I can only think maybe one or two of the Wigan based lads may have started there. If so, I wonder why they didn't stay there?

To be fair to Hull KR they missed Kristian Bell badly who is a great talent and away with England academy at the moment.

They where demolished on the day though.

How none of our 18's made that squad is hard to take. Seems to be the same old story though at those levels.

I believe that may be the 3, as you are aware we weren't allowed to run an 18's but have plenty of that age group in our reserves who are doing well.

Who said you couldn't run an u18's?

If I remember correctly you were stopped from running an u18's back in 2007 because the RFL were not happy about things during the 2006 season. Then when you were allowed to you chose not to because the RFL said if you want to run an u18's then you have to run an u21's 1st. To get around this you wanted to run a joint u21's with Wigan. This would have minimal financial outlay for the u21's thus allowing you put your resources into the u18's. When the RFL quite rightly said no to the Wigan scheme Leigh knew full well that they wouldn't be able to afford to run both an u21 and u18's and with the RFL saying the u21's come 1st, you didn't really have much choice. No-one has actually stopped you from running an u18's though have they? Its more of a case of the fact you can't afford to run 2 academy teams. I bet if Leigh had it their way they would drop their u21 and just run an u18's instead.

As were our 18's...