Saturday, 11 April 2009
Co-Operative Rugby League Conference National
East Lancashire Lions 16-52 Hemel
Liverpool Buccaneers 56-8 Featherstone Lions
Warrington Wizards 18-36 Bramley

Nottingham W/O Carlisle

Huddersfield Underbank Rangers O/W Gateshead Storm (i.e. Underbank couldn't raise a team, which has me shocked I have to say)

Not sure if these are rearranged or awarded 24-0

I have to feel sorry for Gateshead Storm as they haven't had a match the first two weeks

as far as i am aware they are trying to re-arrange them

Embarrassing for the competition all the same

no more or no less than the other three games that have been postponed for the same reason

Precisely - so how do you see the direction the competition goes to revive its credibility ?

i'm not sure there is a direction or is that direction

What happened with Dewsbury Celtic-East Lancashire Lions who couldn't raise a team there?

Not sure how fair it is on Gateshead Storm to have to play loads of midweek games through no fault of their own, 2 scratched so far and possibly one next week (as East Lancashire have to go up there).

I'm guessing the issue is overlap with BARLA primarily as it only seems to be northern teams affected (and thus regionalisation wouldn't solve things), and there wasn't a problem last year so much but this year we have an extra four rounds lengthening the season.

I guess they have to either tighten minimum criteria (which wouldn't leave many teams) or shorten the season and have a pre-season comp for the teams that can play then. Sadly I imagine they'll either pretend there isn't a problem and make up scores or they'll shorten the season but not provide any more games for the better run clubs

East Lancs



yeah that is a worry



it could be, it could be the lack of foresight



Minimum standards? they have some?

shortening the season turns the comp into a may to august season, ooo hang on, don't they do that in the RLC premier.

that's fine for those that want it, what about the ones that don't?

Maybe with a little bit of thinking, the teams that could get a team out could have played each other at short notice to reduce to call offs to only two games in the first two weeks.

Not a complete solution but could have kept creditbility to the comp.

that calls for common sense, have you met our leaders ?

Not face to face as they have their heads in the sand most of the times.

There's probably only about 7 teams in that category though. To be fair if they're happy to play a smaller league with extra fixtures and have the others in the Premier then that could work, otherwise trying to run a full length season with about a third of the clubs uncapable of doing that is unviable

so why not pipe up whne the fixtures came out? why not re-arrange fixtures on to days when they could fulfil them? they've had plenty of time to sort it out.

I suppose they expected to be able to do a Featherstone Lions and put together scratch teams til the BARLA season ends, but that's easier said than done. In reality they need to limit the number of BARLA players or something if games involving certain teams are going to all go ahead during the BARLA season, as BARLA based teams clearly are going to struggle to raise a team when the BARLA season is still going. Agree clubs should have raised it as a potential issue earlier though, as they may have been able to do something then (whether that means midweek fixtures regularly for BARLA based clubs or a separate pre-season comp and shorter league season is another question). Whether these clubs will survive if BARLA ever switches to summer is very doubtful unless they change