spot on , finish in the bottom half of the league and get awarded a play off spot , just isnt right is it

It matters to us, yes, but last year's GF devalued last year's weekly rounds, and we're now seeing the effect of this with both fans and pundits alike treating the rounds more like glorified friendlies where only pride is at stake. My nightmare scenario is a team "winning" from 8th, yet the Sky commentary team seem to think this would be a good thing. I think if they had their way the season would just be one long, convoluted knock out comp packed with gimmicks.

league leaders champions , then just bring the top 8 premiership play offs back in its original format 1 v 8 , 2 v 7 etc

11 of 14 Grand Finals have been contested between 1st and 2nd place, if people think final league position isn't important then they're dumb. It was eventually going to happen that a team as low as 5th would win it, that's just how sport goes. But it took 14 years and a few variables
- Leeds disruptive off season and injury plagued start, giving them a false league position.
- Wigan running out of steam after the Cup Final.
- Warrington suffering from not being involved in enough close tight games during the regular season.

It will probably be another 14 years before another team wins from 5th-8th place, maybe longer. Just look at the performances of Catalans, Hull FC, and KR last year's 6th-8th teams in the playoffs, all dumped out quite convincingly.

There have been 14 Grand Finals, so either that's a typo or you've forgotten about 1998-2001! 28 GFists.
Also, 4 have been from outside the top 2. Wigan (2003), Bulls (2005 & champs), Saints (2011) all third and Leeds (2011 & champs) fifth.

4 out of 28. Does it matter where you finish in the league? 24 out of 28 in the top two says yes!

Here's the thing though, it's either that the playoffs are a formality and 1v2 will be the norm GF, or the weekly rounds have less meaning because it's all about the POs and GF. It can't be both as the RFL and Sky seem to want.

If 6th, 7th or 8th won a GF it would make a mockery of the league in my opinion (and arguably Leeds already did that to some degree going by the number of comments we've seen regarding how much (or rather little) the rounds mean). At the very least it would render the term "Champions" ridiculous (again, Leeds have arguably done this to some degree by being 5th place champions) and would create a schism between what are supposedly two parts of one competition. It would be a travesty if that result came up, so why have a structure which allows it as a possibility. If the response to that is "Ah but it will never happen" then why have that structure in the first place?

Why if the teams in 1st-8th all finished on the same points



I think the play-offs being this size only work if the league is competitive. At the moment, some pretty mediocre teams are getting into play-off places.

Well the point of making it a 8 team playoff i believe was to give teams around that 7th-11th place something to fight for come the season end otherwise the last 6-7 games for those teams seemed pretty meaningless.
When it was a 5 team playoff people complained about seeing the same teams every year there (Saints, Leeds, Wigan, Bradford) and wanted some of the other teams to be able to taste playoff competition to help them other teams grow and close the gap to what was at the time 'The Big 4'.
It's like most things in RL, people moaned about the Eng/France mid season game and asked for a better challenge along the lines of an Exiles game......it was introduced and then people just complained about that too.
At the end of the day.....Some RL fans are just never satisfied.

That playoff system, as a concept is absolutly fine.

Sure you can back and forth about should it be top 5? should it be top 6? or whatever, but the concept itself is brilliant.

How many other showpiece events compare to the grand final in domestic sport in this country?

Maybe the FA cup. But that's it.

We call the whole thing a draw and play tiddly winks instead.




Any team who finishes below 4th place in a 14 team competition is mediocre. If they weren't they'd have finished higher.

I totally agree that it's a fantastic showpiece, but there's a pay-off in order to have that spectacle and people will always argue about whether or not we're paying too much. In this case the question is whether or not the spectre of a low placed "Champion" is detrimental to the weekly rounds.

If it's 2 v 3 then the winner is playing for a chance to compete for a spot in the GF. The shorter route to the final, with the ability to lose and still have a chance against the bottom teams, is your reward. And those bottom teams have nothing but sudden death games. No second chances down there.

If it was 2 v 5 then what happens if 5 wins? Is it the same as when 2 wins?

5 should have to do it tough to be in a position of challenging 2. It should be the story of their heroics, not 2's one off failure.

Games that should be surrounded in excitement just aren't anymore. Take Leeds vs Warrington, iirc both coaches said before the game they weren't overly bothered if they were to lose the fixture this time in the season. That should have been a massive game between two sides competing for the title. A lot of people were bagging shaun wane for his team selection against widnes and lost the tie, but in all honestly it doesn't really matter. wigan will make the top 8. why worry about losing the odd game here and there even if it used to be a big tie, aslong as you place around the top of the table. Hate the system, the season is filled with meaningless games.

Ah ok, I see what you mean there.

Apologies it was typo, and completely forgot about Saints last year.

Its the top 8 that is ruining it. In the top 5/6 format only twice did teams outside the top 2 make the GF. We've only had a top 8 for 3 years and alreadys its been done twice.

I think finishing in the top 2 is less likely to produce the Grand Finalists than ever as their is hardly anything between the top 6.

The commentary on Sky is shocking in demeaning the weekly rounds. I can't remember who, may have been Paul Cullen, said that week that it wasn't surprising that Liam Hood came on for the last 15 minutes in such a big game when he has little experinace because Hood getting 15 minutes was [umore important[/u than winning the game!!!!!!!!!

.The playoffs are no doubt reducing the weekly intensity of the competition. Why, for example, would Wire players go through the pain barrier to win weekly round games when no matter how many they win, they still won't be delivered a Championship. After what happened to them last year I don't blame them. If you finish top you should get 2 cracks at making the GF, not 1. Look at Leeds in 2004, when they finished top for first time in years, they got a 2nd bite, after losing to Bradford, and ended up winning it.

It could also be noted that in the last 3 years there are different teams pushing for the top game now as well, in all seriousness there are 4, 5 teams that could rightly claim to be title contenders

To me, its that close between Hudds, Leeds, Wire, Wigan, Saints, Catalan, and maybe Hull, that if you do manage to finish top, above all the other great teams over an 8 month period of fixtures you deserve to be Champions more than ever.

We all know, in a knockout 80 min game they can all beat each other on their day, its who can manage to be top at the end of the full season that is more impressive.

I couldnt agree more.

Scrap the Magic Weekend and the playoff series then, will give a longer off-season for elite players.

As long as you have an unbalanced fixture list however, first past the post is not an acceptable way of deciding the champions IMO.

This is a bit of a myth really. And an all too easy excuse for people (including Warrington fans) to use to explain it. The fact is, Leeds won with a closing minutes penalty kick, if Myler had been onside when he charged down the drop goal attempt, it could well have been that Warrington drove up field for Briers to kick a winning drop goal.

My summary of the situation was: Leeds won, fair and square, perhaps the best game of Rugby League I watched all last season and one which literally could have swung either way at the death. Superb entertainment which is what the playoffs is allegedly all about.

An unbalanced fixture list is the only valid justification for having a playoffs in the first place IMO. (Aside from the fact that it's also an exciting climax to the year, which can't be argued against, the quality of the games, specifically the semi-finals and the final itself, tend to be amazing).

One thing the traditionalists (we always had playoffs prior to '74 so what's your problem, etc) always fail to mention (deliberately or not I can never work out), is that the original playoffs system used in RL was done so precisely because it was so [idifficult[/i to have an even fixture list, especially in the early 1900s, where the players all had full time jobs and travelling across the country was logisitically much more difficult, time consuming and expensive than it is now.

At a certain point, tradition takes over with these things (we've always done it this way, why change it) - but the reasons as to why something is done the way it is get lost and regarded as irrelevant, but IMO it's just as relevant as the tradition itself. If in the early days of the Northern Union travel across the country for all teams was no big problem, and had it been easy to run a balanced league fixture list, I think it likely that playoffs would never have featured in RL in this country until introduced in 1998.

Agreed, Leeds played exactly the same teams that Warrington did in the regular season, only they lost more often. Or maybe that was part of Leeds (unsporting) plan all along - to make sure they played tighter games by purposely being crap?

All this discussion does do one thing, it diminishes Leeds (or IMO Rob Burrows, let's face it, without him Leeds wouldn't have got past round 1) amazing feat of winning the Grand Final from 5th

On the contrary, I think Leeds performed amazingly in the last month of the regular rounds and in the playoffs, teams will be hard pushed to ever emulate that.

What does diminish Leeds' achievement though is to say that they only beat Warrington because of Warrington's inexperience in those kind of games. Implying that somehow Leeds had no right to win it.