I contrast I have been involved with long standing amateur Rugby league clubs here in the heartlands who struggle to raise one team.

Mine has just folded it's winter Pennine team for that very reason.

I think it was a Sky game and they used Sky's video of the kicks to prove he'd done it in the time. I don't think the club would have paid anyway it was the car dealership that sponsiored the event.

Its' very depressing. When the Lost Loiners have been nomadic in the past, looking for somewhere to knock about on a Monday evening its' been the RU clubs that have been welcoming and hospitable, not the rL clubs.

Our home now, Morley, have been great to us for the last five or six years and there is literally NO issues with us being RL lads or any chips on their shoulders. In fact, many of the Morley boys and admin avidly watch RL as well.

I know of precisely 0 RU players/fans who were not thoroughly impressed by Burgess' try the other day. I suspect that had an RU player scored such a try many RL players/fans who would have dismissed it astripe on the grounds that the Vichy government seized RL's assets in france before they were born and that the Southern RFU refused to pay broken time payments and threw Ray French off a train.

LOINERTILIDIE--- "The point is that Union DO do these things. "

Well said and the GOLDENGAMBLE itself rarely pays out its full prize.Gives me the impression that sales have topped out.On away matches the prize available seems consistently smaller.
Conversely it would be interesting to know what the Gprem clubs normal revenue incomes are like for this type of scheme.

The biggest thing holding rugby league back in this country is the attitude of its fans IMO. Too large a percentage are the sort of bitter, small-time, insular people who are happy providing their own club is doing alright irrespective of the bigger picture.

Perhaps the comments of the Hull KR chief exec yesterday that he believes the average pre-tax loss of the 14 SL clubs to be in the region of £450k this year might act as a reality check to those within the game. It's quite capable of killing itself through apathy and mismanagement without Union having to lift a finger.

There seems to be an assumption that RL NEEDS to expand to survive, NEEDS to be innovative and forward thinking, NEEDS to be bigger than it is.

The RFL are continually trying to expand the sport out side a country’s ‘heartland’ and it continually fails.

Why is it that we can't just accept that we have a parochial sport and be happy with it – it has managed to survive for over 100 years as is and will never be as big as RU, why is that such a bitter pill to swallow?

Expansion makes sense from the point of view of the international game. We currently have players from at best 3 or 4 counties representing England, and little or no decent representation from Scotland, ireland and Wales.

I guess the long term vision is to have clubs from outside the heartlands, and a greater number of people playing the game, and being scouted, and therefore being available for the national sides.

At the moment, we simply don;t have the talent, or intensity of matches to compete on the international stage

If any business doesn't expand and look to exploit new markets it will wither and die.

By expanding outside its geographical heartlands, rugby league will attract larger spectator and player bases generating increased revenue. A larger player base potentially presents a greater opportunity of being competitive, maybe even dominant at international level giving the profile of the sport a massive boost.

The financial results being posted at all levels of the game would suggest that remaining as things are is simply not a viable long term option.

We will never be able to compete on the international stage as long as the Aussies continue to pump millions of $’s a year into their amateur game.

We will always be behind them in that respect, we will always be the poorer cousin.

A vast majority (virtually all) of RL income is generated within the heartlands so why bother wasting valuable time and resources trying to tout for business elsewhere?

A very idealistic view but outside the heartlands there is very little interest in our sport so why not concentrate generating further interest where there is already some.

The ‘Welsh experiment’ is nothing but pure folly by the RFL and will inevitably result in failure while also denying a team with genuine potential from reaching it.

How long RU fans will continue to support the game at the turnstiles if the dross on offer doesn't improve is a concern (or should be) to the administrators & press.
We have the better product IMO but not the clout nationally to exploit this.
Had any RU player scored the try made by Billy Slater we'd never hear the end of it.

At what point did the position right here, right now become what it will always be?

The challenge for the RFL is to generate and build that interest outside the heartlands where effectively the game is already operating at saturation point. How many more people in Castleford who aren't already interested in the game do you think the Tigers could attract for example?

Denying a team with real potential? Such as who? Widnes? Leigh? Halifax?

Take a look at what happened to those clubs when they were given the opportunity to "reach their potential" in SL. Add Workington and Oldham to your list too. They simply were not able to attract revenue sufficient to make them competitive, and drove themselves into financial ruin attempting to do so. Why should they, and indeed why would they want to, expose themselves to the same situation again?

Castleford already has a full time team – Widnes is currently in a viable financial position and have a business plan in place, there is already interest in RL within the town but they get ignored to try and generate interest in a geographical area traditionally dominated by RU.

I went to Newport this year and saw nothing but a handful of RL fans, a couple of hundred RU fans with free tickets and a couple of thousand Leeds fans. If that is the model that the RFL is basing it’s expansion on then the sport will wither and die.

How many expansion attempts will the RFL try before they realise that they are wasting time and money that should have been spent try to rekindle existing interest rather than trying to light a fire with damp matches and wet newspaper?

Widnes had a full time team as recently as what, four or five years ago?

It wasn't financially viable then, what's changed?

Even in the club's heyday of the 70s and 80s, they were struggling to attract what would now be considered "big" crowds to Naughton Park. So where are these extra fans going to come from that weren't around the last time they were in SL to make it a viable proposition again?

The ‘extra fans’ will be more difficult to find in a area that doesn’t even know there is another Rugby code than in a town where their friends and family already may have season tickets.


I believe that there is more security in our sport by nurturing its existing interest.

You believe the sports resources would be better spent looking into ‘untapped’ areas.

I think we could dance this dance all day so will have to agree to disagree.


[size=42But I’m right.[/size

You ought to have a look at the dates some of the apparently heartland clubs were founded in.

Or indeed at how many clubs who switched to RL in it's early years fared.

Failing to expand is nonsense. It completely ignores the changing dynamics of rugby league's place in the sporting market.

Take out the Welsh folly, scrap the Catalans, ditch Harlequins. I wonder how that might effect bargaining power with Sky? Would they even be interested in a parochial little sport at all? What would happen to the amateur scene or youth development in these areas? How many talented youngsters from the heartlands would stick with a parochial, possibly un-publicised and bankrupt rugby league over a completely dominant rich rugby union?

The alternative to expansion is a relentless decline in playing standards, spectator levels and revenue to the point where professional RL would cease to exist.

If I may.

There is a school of thought that the Australians pump millions of dollars into the amateur game. I believe this to be true.

Question is who? The taxpayer? I doubt it. Industry, again I doubt it. The [iconsumer[/i, there you go.

But how?

Casinos, bars, hotels, cinema's etc, all owned and operated by the clubs.

So effectively the clubs have formed themselves into somewhere the consumer wants to spend both time and money. There is a community in these places. A sense of belonging, or a sense of ownership?

The player development is all part of that, people want to be part of the club because the club is their social life, their entertainment, not just in terms of RL but everything else that goes with it.

IF, one single RL club could get the planning permission for something like [url=http://penrith.panthers.com.au/Homethis[/url then maybe we could start about engaging the whole of the surrounding area in the experiment, make it the centre of everyones universe.

What have we got, the FAE? Come on. The problem isn't with the RFL it's with the games attitude to progress and development.

RU has got to where it is now largely thanks to the fact its played in nearly every school in the country, whereas League are only now starting to try and expand school participation.
It gets kids interested from a young age without having had to make an effort to go to a club.

As for RU having clubs having more teams, York RU when I used to play for them had 3 mens teams, a Cavaliers team, a Colts team, an U17 and god knows how many kids teams and in all the teams it seemed much friendlier and more approachable than the vast majority of RL clubs that I've been to.

If I could be @rsed to get up and play again I know which code it would be, and I would have much less chance of being involved in a fight, have a brick thrown at me or have some backward ex convict elbow me in the face.

...and there you have it.

There is very little option for communities in Oz. They don’t have a pub on every corner so the ONLY choices for social drinking they have is either picking a case of tinnys from the bottle shop or heading down to the local sports club – surfing, cricket or maybe their only ‘local’ just happens to be a RL clubhouse.

It’s just the way it is out there and as long as they have this evolved social culture we will never be able to compete on an international level.

The war is over.

The more dominant code has won.

Hypothetical prognosis indeed and the only way to test your theory would be to test it, i.e. get rid of Welsh and London teams (although I deliberately did not mention the French club as it sits in its own heartland) and concentrate on developing heartland clubs.

Although I do concede that there may be some pressure on the RFL to expand by its commercial sponsors although once again this is an assumption.

I don't know why sports bother to expand.

Its not like some of the European football giants sign players just to cash in on the potential from the Asian market is it now?

20 years ago, football in the likes of S.Korea, Japan and China was nowhere, but the right marketting has made it a huge money spinner.

There is no reason why RL can't do this on a smaller scale.

Having seen the effect RL has had on people from outside the heartland, I can say that expansion can work, but it won't happen overnight.