They had forced mergers in Australia and as a result, their game has gone stronger with clubs more spread out while we have carried on with having too many clubs in the same catchment areas with poor facilities and playing in out of date grounds.

Swinton being a prime example, situated in the City of Salford, never had a ground of their own since selling Station Road and now playing at the ground of Sale RU which is in the borough of Trafford.

Oldham is not much better, sell their ground at Watersheddings where they got decent crowds and now play at a former little football ground and watched by a fraction of what was its support.

Not to mention Batley and Dewsbury situated within a stone's throw of each other.

Its time that some of the smaller clubs face reality and stopped clinging to the past!

That sounds like a sure-fire way of killing the game. I support Wigan because I was born and bred in the town. I wouldn't feel any affinity with any of those franchises and would be lost to the sport. If the folk of Manchester loved RL so much, Salford would get more than 2,000 fans each week.

Back in the day, I thought there were some genuine opportunities for mergers. The Cumbrian clubs, for instance. the likes of Batley, Dewsbury and Hunslet. But as soon as people started talking about Wigan and Saints, Wire and Widnes, Hull and Hull KR, it became ridiculous. At the time these were some of the biggest derbies in the competition and to lose them on the off-chance 'big city' franchises would take RL by storm would have been a ridiculous leap into the dark.

But even these smaller ships have now sailed, I fear.

The problem the game still has is that there are too many smaller clubs hanging on by their fingernails. Even Phil Clark, who's a total buffoon in my view, said a couple of months ago that a lot of our smaller clubs should no longer be classified as professional because they quite clearly aren't even though they continue to use up resources.

Unfortunately Aus also had two major broadcasting networks fighting to throw money at a sport which had no real competition in it's heartland. Mergers and new teams might have made some sense in 1990 but not generally today. We possibly missed a trick when Union showed that there was a market for a quality rugby side in the Midlands and we have managed to make a reasonably successful start in London into a failure. Now that we have P and R we have undercut the financial stability of the sport and there does not seem the likelihood of new British teams being able to reach the top table.

Its not about the bigger clubs like Wigan, Hull, Leeds, St Helens, Warrington etc but the smaller clubs like Batley, Dewsbury, Featherstone, Hunslet, Keighley, Leigh, Swinton who get poor crowds, are situated in then shadow of the bigger clubs, no ground and struggling to survive in the now harder economic times.

It is obvious that some clubs will have to merge of they will simply go under, especially after the preset virus situation.