Add Toulouse to that mix, along with Catalans (who weren't there in 1999) and it just might stop the sneering.

Leeds
Bradford
Huddersfield
Wakefield/Calder United
Hull FC
Hull KR
Wigan
St. Helens
Warrington
Salford
London
Newcastle
Catalans
Toulouse

That mix looks a [ibit more[/i like England, sprinkled with a dash of France on top.

I know that a couple more southern English clubs, a Welsh club, and a third French club, would make it even more legitimately national and international. But those four contenders which I mentioned would at least be a start.

Meanwhile watch the four PNG players start smashing the defenses of the other Championship One clubs. Winger Garry Lo in particular -- the next Marcus Bai -- is going to accumulate a lot of tries. These PNG players are a cut above the playing standard of Championship One.

I fully expect a steady stream of young PNG talents will want to join their compatriots at Newcastle/Gateshead before too long.

Gateshead are already in super league masquerading as Hull F.C....

Blah blah blah change the record! Don't forget where your y
team started off!

and in Huddersfield!

Hopefully this could be the base for a strong club in the future.
Personally I think it's brilliant, and I hope that, like Salford who are steadily heading toward being called Manchester, Gateshead will change name to Newcastle.

A future SL with Manchester and Newcastle in it would be great and those 2 cities should be our targets for expansion in my opinion.

I think Newcastle is a more realistic target for expansion than London.

Interesting. Care to expand as to why?

I believe for the game to grow it needs to be much bigger in the whole of the North/Midlands and not just the M62 corridor. The clue of expansion is in the word itself. You don't just pick the capital city about 200 miles away and say 'capital city, loads of people, let's expand'. I think it needs more teams with a high profile within reach of the epicentre. There are loads across the M62 but it needs more up and down the M1 and A1. Think of it more in terms of creep than expansion. If we could get competitive teams in York, Newcastle, Derby, Nottingham, Leicester etc then the game would be a much more attractive proposition further afield. Those who know very little about the game will never be bothered while ever it is stuck along the M62. If the game and the successful promotion of it started to creep to the cities previously mentioned, people might start to take notice.

Very much what I have suggested in the past, even to the point of the RFL actively searching out stadiums ( possibly council owned ) in towns/citys 40/50 miles from the heartlands and providing extra funding/management to get them up and running tied in with junior club development

Very much what I have suggested in the past, even to the point of the RFL actively searching out stadiums ( possibly council owned ) in towns/citys 40/50 miles from the heartlands and providing extra funding/management to get them up and running tied in with junior club development

Good post.

Although I agree with the above (non-troll) statements and endorse a creep out of the M62 corridor, we also need to ensure we hit towns where there is already an interest in the oval ball. Sheffield is a football stronghold and so the Eagles have had an uphill struggle. Nottingham failed. We cannot just parachute the game into football areas.
Preston? Further help for Coventry?
Well done Newcastle.

I don't think we should try and keep away from football cities at all.
Although the seasons of football and RL overlap, it would be crazy to ignore the larger towns and cities, just because they have a football club.

As some have already said, the most sensible option to grow the sport is to spread out from the games geographic core and if we were still n the
franchise era, this would have been relatively simple to manage.

The problem that we have now is, the fact that nobody is likely to invest significant sums of money in a club that, at best, may get a chance to play in
an annual qualification league.

Although the franchise idea spectacularly failed, it was certainly a better option for expanding the game, either in the UK or France.

Sadly, our governing body wasn't capable of managing the franchise idea properly.

As for Gateshead/Newcastle, why not, but it will be a hefty challenge for the people involved.

Why is being 'Newcastle' preferable to being 'Gateshead'?

Newcastle: population 280200, 2 x elite pro-football clubs

Gateshead: population 200200, 0 x elite pro-football clubs

Go the whole hog and rebrand Tyneside Thunder.

Disagree : let's keep the marketing simple. Thanks (partly) to a Mr Wilkinson and his boot, Newcastle has a rugby ethos that we could use. The superb efforts of the RL activists in Gateshead cannot be ignored but there is a potential in Newcastle we cannot ignore.

Completely agree. I think as a sport we should be doing more to create more players at grassroots level, by getting the sport played in more schools and creating more strong amateur clubs in these areas.

It sounds like Gateshead have done a good job in the North East, with 14 amateur clubs up there, which can all feed into Thunder.

There are still some big towns/cities close by that the RFL should focus on. The ones you mentioned, plus Sheffield & Manchester, which for the size of them have very few clubs, Liverpool too.

After the challenges that particular club has had, it would be brilliant to see some level of success at Thunder.

If that's getting into the Championship and no further then so be it.

The people at the club work super hard as it is, so this will be no more of a challenge than keeping the club alive.

Because to start with those population figures are incorrect.
If you're taking just the city/town boundaries then it's:
Newcastle 280k
Gateshead 78k

But if you're taking what most people understand as Newcastle which includes the area around it, in the same way as when people talk about London they don't mean just the City of London, then Newcastle's population jumps to well over 1m.
Those people associate themselves with the large regional centre that is Newcastle. And even if they don't they're far more likely to associate themselves with that regional centre than they are a relatively small town somewhere else in that region.

It's also not like Gateshead has a significant fan base or following that would be put off by a name change. And since they will be actually moving out of Gateshead and into Newcastle I personally think it would be daft not to change the name.

Aye, that was the new merged team in 1999 wasn't it ?

Has it been 150 years already....lol

I also would use the Newcastle name, they are passionate about the city and sport. If it could be linked to the Football club as well, all the better. People who don't know the area, don't realise just what a big step crossing the Tyne is, either way, they are poles a part...

A team of magpies would fly I'm sure.....

You talk about the non-M62 parts of the country and then suggest Bradford .. Have you seen a map of the UK at all????

Why Bradford over Castleford or Widnes? What makes them more worthy? 3 towns/cities that are all sitting on the M62 so why suggest that dumping 2 of them in favour of one that has shown no greater ability to successfully manage a team in recent years?

So "North East Thunder" then?

That's a pretty short memory