They are compared to Wakefield, trust me.

We aren't a rich club, the cost of having a reserves isn't worth it when you only get a few friendlies and games get called off regularly due to injuries, I'm sure you will see this next year. It isn't worth running until there is a proper reserve league structure

You are a wealthy club in RL terms and clearly Michael Carter feels it's worth it. So instead of making excuses why don't fans of clubs like Hull and Leeds make it clear that they want A team RL?

Hell you can now use Wakefield to beat them with, if we can do it then anyone can - I mean surely you don't want Shakey Wakey to have something you havn't

How many games have Wakefield's reserves played so far exactly? Just curious because the way it's being talked about you'd think they've made a raging success of it and made it work,

Yes I'm really jealous of Wakefields reserve side.

Right im going to write to Pearson and demand that he makes us have a reserve team as suddenly according to Wakey fans (don't remember you lot demanding a reserve team the last two years) it is needed, just because the likes of Pearson, Radford, McDermott and Hetherington don't think it is worth it at the current time, what do these know about rugby anyway?

They invented it

Blimey you are a precious soul and a humorless one to boot. Sorry for mildly criticising the mighty FC.

Correct, we are quite mighty.
Going for back to back, to back, Wembley victories in the new year.

To right you are that was inferred all along it's just that Dave is to dim or to over sensitive to realise it. Hull are a leading club so lead I say.

Can you please define ‘extremely wealthy’ to me. Do we get more funding than you?
We probably get roughly double your home attendances. But i’m quite confident that our ground rent is more than double what you pay. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if our rent is somewhere near to what you where quoted to pay at your new ground, which according to many of your fans, would cripple the club.

Come on Vastman, Iv'e been on this forum as long as you and I have never seen you give a compliment to another club, you won't have your club mentioned in any bad light and you have the nerve to call me touchy. I'm sure you were moaning earlier this week as Cas fans slagged off your fish and chip van sponsorship from last year

Let's just see how succesful your resrve team will be, unless all other sides join i'd bet Wakey scarp it in the near future.

Merry Christmas to you, Wakey and all other RL fans, think you will go well again this year, not as good as the mighty and rich Hull FC though

They are one of the leaders, just because they aren't doing something that you THINK is a good idea and is largely born out of nostalgia of old A teams in most people who want to see it return doesn't change that.

The likes of Pearson and Hetherington have done pretty good jobs at their clubs (picked up 6 of the last 9 domestic trophies handed out between their clubs) and maybe their decision as much as you don't agree with shouldn't be met with such dismissive criticism. Maybe it isn't the great idea you think it is.

2013 was the last time we gave a debut to a home grown player that now plays in our starting XVII when everyone is fit. Brad Fash is the only one of late that is looking anything like good SL standard. Since 2013 we've released/shunned loads of youngsters in favour of overseas players or players from other clubs, as I keep saying either our kids aren't good enough or the junior coaching/talent development isn't good enough.

Radford has burned/scapegoated certain players and let them go, he's brought no-one through in his 4 year tenure that plays in the starting XVII. Lancaster and Logan were outstanding in their few games several years ago but Lancaster was left out in the cold and Radford continued to sign Talanoa who whilst ok at times is defensively weak and slow as anything (so Lancaster left) Logan before his injury was doing just great and again shunned/scapegoated for poor defence inside of him. We haven't developed a half since the early 2000s, we got rid of our decent understudy to Houghton (Cunningham who went to London) because we insist on flogging Houghton for 80 minutes every game and playing washbrook as a back up when he's been injured.

Yes we have some very good and in some cases international level Hull born players but of the last 4 years we have been an absolute shambles at bringing home grown talent through at any decent standard. Turgut isn't up to much, started 3 times and off the bench 11 but isn't much cop and has an undisciplined streak in him. Jack Downs might make it but at 22 got 4 games off the bench last year and 2 before that, he's essentially only going to get a game if we are down to bare bones, Motongo is okay, he's a big lump and could come good but needs regular game time however we signed Paea so unlikely to get much action, Fash is the pick of the younger crop and is solid but no game breaker.
I really worry about where the next crop of youngsters are coming from, it's all well and good signing other clubs youngsters which we've done a lot of lately, Connor, Rawsthorne being two of the latest and Connor is a real find but we have precisely no-one coming through in the halves or backs and will be signing from outside the club in that area for the foreseeable future.

Bumpy still full of bitterness after Radford & Pearson made a kunt out of him. https://www.change.org/p/adam-pearson-h ... e_petition

Bumpy still full of bitterness after Radford & Pearson made a kunt out of him. https://www.change.org/p/adam-pearson-h ... e_petition

I don't know whether it was true without looking myself but a poster had said he looked at previous accounts in the thread about the supposed redevelopment of Belle Vue and the numbers mentioned were that Wigan paid under £400k and Hull paid £350k P/A if I remember right.
I also think you'll be surprised how much this guy who now owns Belle Vue is wanting in rent, especially considering what we get for the money and it's probably the reason why things are taking so long to finalise. When the Bank of Ireland owned it I believe we were paying around £250k.
Also, it wasn't just the crazy £500k for a tarted up Belle Vue that would cripple us, but the fact they wanted a Capital investment from us to help them redevelop it which would have been the killer, especially when we still wouldn't have owned a bit of it and would have only got income from home games.

Wakefield already cancelling reserve games at the last minute less than half a season into running one. After much chest beating over starting a reserve team they can't even fulfill a fixture even when they're spread out, what chance do teams stand trying to do it on a more regular almost weekly basis?

Reserve fixtures are a nightmare, and if Fax can run a reserve squad using funds mainly generated from their supporters club, then why can't other clubs do the same? It's taken 2 or 3 years, but Fax have several ex-reserve team players in their 1st team squad now, with some of them definitely looking like they have the potential to go on to bigger and better things.

There are multiple threads about the demise of the game in the UK and how we don't have enough quality players to sustain a strong competition, but SL clubs just aren't doing enough to provide the platform for players to develop into the stars of tomorrow. It's not a quick fix, but a medium term investment, and one that shouldn't be too onerous for SL teams at around the £25k mark to run a reserve squad for 12 months.

No chance at all if most don’t even try.

Our reserves seem to be going ok. Game coming up vs Fax. Shame that as we started others jacked it in. It's had its benefits for us in keeping fringe players fit.

It's a useful stepping stone for those players not ready for 1st team that have come up from 19s.

I still don't see where this notion that reserves are "essential" comes from. I get the benefits, I would rather my club ran one, but I honestly don't see a reserves league as the panacea that so many seem to suggest.

The club I support doesn't run a reserves team and even when it did, it didn't take it seriously. Instead, the club's policy has been to invest in the level below the reserves (the academy) and to have players beyond that who can't get into its own first team playing in somebody elses (usually London's, Featherstone's, Hunslet's or, going further back, Bramley's). It's a mentality that has served the club well, I can't think of many players who have come back to haunt the club because they didn't run a reserve league team.

There are lots of problems with the sport and there are lots of problems with participation, but I really don't see a reserves league as anywhere near the sort of solution that so many seem to think it is. It's just a lazy and easy answer to a much more complicated problem.

Having a proper reserve league isn't the answer to everything by any means, but it would help increase the active player pool participating regularly in games. As well as providing game time for fringe players, it means that players returning from injury have an opportunity to get back up to speed as well. It's the response that not having a reserve team "has served the club well" that sums it up. Reserve squads will be of more benefit directly to some clubs than others, but by having an active league at that level it should help the game overall. It's certainly not a solution in itself, but something that would (imo) have a noticeable impact across the board after 3 or 4 years of bedding in.

Agreed.

I don't necessarily disagree with that sentiment, but I do find it frustrating how much the idea of a reserves league gets thrown around as an answer to so many of the game's challenges.

If we have a defined purpose and goal for a reserves league, then that would be a start but as we saw with what we had previously, different clubs see the purpose of reserves in different lights. If player development is one such goal, do SL academy players learn more in a reserve league that they do, for example, on loan to a Championship club? Have the likes of Jimmy Keinhorst or Ash Handley developed more whilst on dual registraion at Featherstone, or Mikolaj Oledzki at Bradford, than they would have playing other 'fringe' players? We'll never know definitively, but that doesn't automatically make one system better than the other - and yet that's often how the reserves league is portrayed.

And I don't think its necessarily wrong for clubs to look at if from a "what works for us" perspective. I'm not going to run the numbers now, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find more than a handful of clubs in the top three tiers that don't have, or haven't recently had, an ex-Leeds academy graduate in their squad. The approach that Leeds are taking, with or without a reserve team, is benefitting the wider sport - the club have more than done their bit on the talent pool side of things.

When it comes to the talent pool, there's also the argument that the reserves is too late. What we need is a greater volume of players coming into the game to begin with, and a better quality of player coming into the game at junior level. If that means that resources are put into engaging community coaching, improving amateur facilities and structures, and academies, that's arguably better than putting resources in trying to polish 'rough diamonds' that are too good / old for academy rugby, but not up to first team standard.

I'd be interested to see how many players we are actually losing from the sport due to a lack of reserve league, if indeed we are. I know there are some high profile proponents of the system that claim that they would have been lost to the game without it, but many of these are speaking from a hypothetical perspective. There's nothing to say that Jamie Peacock wouldn't have spent a year on loan, or that he wouldn't have made his Bradford debut earlier than he did, if we didn't have a loan system. The claim that we lose players due to a lack of reserves is often made, but has anyone actually looked at it objectively?

A reserve side or "A" team may well be the right way to bring in new players and help senior players back to match fitness following a lay off.
However, it has to be all or nothing and what we have currently (with so few clubs operating reserve sides) is not really working.
Would it be a better option to allow say a maximum of 2 or 3 "overage" players to drop down into the senior academy sides ?

When Hull KR were first promoted, iirc, it was 16s, 18s and 20s with three overage players allowed in the last. Or something like that. Then they went to 16 and 19s and about that time brought in dual-reg.

I think either of those work. I largely agree with what the printer says about a reserves system though. For super league clubs i’m not sure there is a sweet spot where it is both affordable and useful. If SL teams need to be seen to do their bit, I think redistributing more money to Championship 1 teams makes more sense rather than creating another level below that.

Given the current power structure of the game, the champ 1 clubs would likely pay a price in terms of independence though. The partnerships Rovers and Hull have established with York and Doncaster seem to be running smoothly, but there seems to be an assumption, among fans of the SL pair at least, that they’re de facto reserve teams. And it doesn’t look completely unjustified.