I don't want to make it any harder than it is for the RFL to do the right thing, but I can't help but mentally drafting the press release...

'While licensing appeared to offer a sensible method for managing movement of clubs between our elite competition and the Championship, we found in practice that the wrong clubs kept going bust.'

Just a joke - there is no shame in admitting to an honest error.

Yes. I think something like that would be required, the gap between full and part time is to far to bridge, particulalry when you only have from October to February to sort it out.

Then they have to accept that Wigan or Saints or Leeds could go down. Might make them think about doing something to close the gap, I guess.

With a 3 year cycle you have to accept that a SL team could reach the play-offs (potentially even the grand final) and be relegated. Or a Championship team might go up never having finished better than 4th during the 3 years.

There's no perfect solution, every choice is a sacrifice.

The failure of licensing wasn't that it was imperfect, it was that it wouldn't admit it was. Eventually it was faced with a question it couldn't duck and its unacknowledged flaws were exposed.

It has been drawn to my attention that Wakefield was also a newco, albeit one that voluntarily chose to honour some of the oldco's debt. Thus, it'd be inconsistent to deny Bradford a SL place.

I stand by my criticisms of licensing - though if we did 'go pop', it would at least offer the consolation of fcimp's reaction to it costing us only 4 or 6 SL points.

That is one of the reason's they stayed in SL. If OK bulls decide to worm out of paying most of the debt then they should be dropped to the championship/1 to make it consistent. IMHO I think that they should go no matter what. This would stop any other club using Admin to get out of the overspending hole they've dug for themselves and would send a clear message to the rest of SL that the RFL will not tolerate anyone bringing the game into disrepute.

However we are talking about the RFL and we all know they don't have the balls to enforce anything.

The distinction is small, and really, in principle, non-existant. If Wakefield weren't chucked out for failing to reach agreement with creditors, it'd be unfair to treat Bradford differently.

The system needs changing before the RFL can start thinking about taking any sort of a stand. And it does need changing.