Who ?

could be the same phantom RFL person thats supposedly said something to Leigh (which we still havent actually been shown any evidence of!!!). that phantom person could be sat at home right now having a right giggle at the attention their chinese whispers are getting amongst Leigh fans....it's all part of the global conspiracy to keep Leigh from meeting set criteria.

Look at it another way.

What would Arthur Thomas (not some two bob halfwit - see previous positions at Wigan and Saints) and Ian Millward (ditto) gain by saying this at a public meeting if there wasn't an element of truth in it?

Even people outside of Leighs bubble have confirmed the same on this very thread.

no one has 'confirmed' anything. and what Leigh seem to be chasing is sympathy...and an attempt to try and get this weekends crowd up

Ian Millward said on GMR last night that Leigh will be running a scholarship next year as it was one of the plus points in their SL application?




He also said that the crowd they will get on Saturday will see them achieve the average crowd criteria..
Nice little look into the future there Ian.

Apparently we have been taking lessons off Salford and Widnes regarding the publication of crowd figures

Well we haven't been doing too good a job on that front... ours have dropped this season. Doesn't get away from the fact that they seem to know what the crowd figure will be on Saturday. What is it you need to get through the gate?

Can't remember his name was an RFL spokesperson after teh Wire Vs Catalan friendly... an official source

One of?



Oh yea I forgot about the beautiful, stunning, sensational LSV

That would be John Ledger, who when asked about academies etc, stated most championship clubs ran academies. Its a pity the RFL media man knows jack about what is going on in RL

Im confused now(easily done I know) I thought Leigh werent allowed to run one.

Na they just after attention as no-one mentioned them for SL 2012!

You do realise there are lots of us who accept (and have said so repeatedly) that we're nowhere near ready for SL don't you?

Should you not be worried about how you can turn your squad full of fluffers into something that won't make an @rse of itself when they do get into SL.

I think you answered you own question. No body knows because someone has come on here and started a thread based on what they heard from an undisclosed source.

A number of fans have taken the chance to call foul and claim double standards. I doubt many of the posters who have said that this is wrong really care if their team has a scholarship program.

In the end there is a lot of effort from the RFL going into raising the standards of Superleague and maybe there should be equal efforts into the Championship. It is hard to see how a Championship team can aim to get a licence when the difference between the two competitions (on and off the field) is getting so wide.

For professional sides in this country it is. Professional clubs should aim to be the best that they can be. I just feel that the point in a scolarship is to train for a job. If there is likely to be no job at the end of it then it is harmful.



That is what ameteur clubs are for. If a child doesn't want to play professionally they there is no need to join a scholarship. They should just enjoy playing for their amateur club.

I don't think they are allowed to run an U18s, even if they could afford it

7 pages and not a shred of evidence.

The U18s thing is between Leigh and the RFL and goes back a couple of years I think. As for evidence, the RFL only publish what they want people to hear. They also decide who they want in SL and design the criteria to fit the purpose. They must think we are stupid. I hope you don't follow the pattern of HKR when you rise to SL, reckon they will announce (already suggested at the back end of last year) debts of £2M over the last 4 years. No way to run a business. Your views on Leigh are well known to me, if in fact it was you that wrote a particularly biased article in the rugby press a few years ago.

Hope you have your blinkers for SL as you are encouraged to forget anything that exists outside those ivory towers.

There is a scholarship programme called AASE (Advanced Academy for Sporting Excellence) which funds elite athletes through college, and must include an elite performance playing environment. In RL, this is being taken to require playing opportunities in the SL Academy, and as such is restricted to SL clubs. It's being rolled out in the new academic year. It's externally funded, though the RFL sets the criteria by which it's awarded, because the RFL is responsible for quality control and is externally monitored.

TASS scholarships have been cut by the new government, though I think they all went into the Student RL anyway, mostly through the Super 8 clubs. I'm not aware there's any other RFL funded or administered scholarship programmes.

The performance pathways that the RFL has set up under Barrie-Jon Mather are the envy of other sports (and are a significant part of the reason why Vinny Webb, Head of Coaching & Performance at the RFL, won the National Coach Educator of the Year award. This has a Regional Player Development Camp at the top of the tree, with Service area squads underneath it, (players can only be at one level, but can move between them as the Talent ID and Coaching teams feel is appropriate for player development). The emphasis on the elite camps is on technique and talent development, and not 'simply' competition, which is in part to error-correct against the age-bias that appears in all youth development programmes (which, across sports, means that 50%+ of the 'talent' junior squads have their birthdays in the first 3 months of the academic year... they are the bigger kids, so get picked, so get better coaching, so are favoured throughout the system if its based on picking a winning team at under 12...). See Malcolm Gladwell's book 'Outliers' for a good explanation of this in detail.

I've no idea what prompted this thread, if it doesn't relate to the above. I do know that the RFL is regarded as the leading sport in youth talent ID and development.

As a separate, side issue, Leigh suffers from two things... first, it has two exceptional amateur clubs who do most of the youth development, and who both perform at the highest levels of the National Youth League. The pro club, then, doesn't run, or take credit for, these structures.

Second, because the 'Wigan and Leigh' service area follows the Local Government boundaries, Leigh Centurions are not the top of the development pyramid even in their own area. Its probably worse for Leigh than it is for, say, the three Calderdale clubs, because Wigan are so impressively well structured for their youth and academy teams.

Even without the service area setup, Wigan tend to hoover up talent when kids turn 17, just as they signed Denis Betts and Ian Gildart from Leigh Rangers back in my age-group (and, at Colts level, Sean Tyrer and Sean Devine from Rangers, and John Thursfield from Woolston, even though those three eventually signed pro at Widnes, Saints and Warrington respectively).

If anyone can provide a concrete example of something they've had to stop doing, or that they want to do and are forbidden, then I can look into it. But it does amaze me sometimes that there's a working assumption from many posters that any kind of rumour or half-tale is instantly accepted as more evidence that the RFL is rubbish. We really are the envy of, and a model for, most other sports, especially in our Coaching and Performance Pathways.

I repeat that Arthur Thomas and Ian Millward said this at a ISA meeting . THE RFL sneaked the further additions to apply for a License just a few week ago, so watch this space I say, as why would our chairman lie?

Which is what? Nobody yet has actually said what they're alleged to have told the meeting. Certainly, we're still waiting on someone (maybe someone who was at the meeting?) to answer this









Why would Ian Milward lie on GMR? Because if both reports are true, he either lied at the meeting or on the radio. Of course, it could be the case that what he said at the meeting is being misreported …

I've asked the question , when I get the answer , I'll post it on here

As for ' someone at the meeting ' , well several who were there have already posted , as for Basil's interview on GMR , that does contradict what he said at the meeting , so hopefully in a day or two I'll have a definate

Just for the record , it is highly unlikely the RFL would provide ' evidence ' of something like this in the form of a press release , so I doubt I will have enough ' evidence for some

Anybody take out a tax efficient savings account in the end?

I'm not sure the additions were sneaked in. The Halifax chairman was talking about the minimum numbers a few months back. SOC has been talking from a while now about the criteria that needed to be met in order to apply without specifically mentioning what they were. I'm pretty sure in one meeting he mentioned that he had attended a meeting where this had been presented to all the Championship Chairmen.
It leaves a nasty taste in my mouth to defend the RFL but it does seem that the Championship clubs were told about these criteria some time ago. Unless there really is a vendetta against Leigh.

Well it does look like he wasn't truthful with everything. Leigh failed to reach the required attendance to push their average crowd figure up over the 2500 mark.

But Halifax did today though, 4795, heh heh