Think the top 8 devalues the true championship (ie the league leaders at the end of the season) even more than top 6 did. But TV pays and what TV says goes.

too early to say after only 1 game

but my first reaction is that it is better because there are more games

the playoffs get the biggest audiences for SKY, and showing more of them can only be good for the sports profile.

also under the old system most teams that finished 5th and 6th just lost their first game and that was that.

also imagine how poor the last few games of the season would have been if loads of teams had nothing to play for. Bradford had a chance of making the 8 and therefore it was a much better game than Hull-Bradford would have been after the appalling seasons both teams have had.

More should be given for actually winning the league...at the end of the day the team that does that has performed the best for the entire season...then the top eight should just play off for some trophy a la the old Premiership.

The top eight is a better concept for me and makes the end-of-season games a little more interesting with less dead rubbers. However the current format, for me, is not good.

IMO, there should be more of an advantage for the top two teams and it should be much more difficult to get to OT from 6th, 7th or 8th.

Perhaps a format closer to the old top 5 system would be better where perhaps the 5th-8th finishing teams have an extra elimination game in week 1 and maybe something more along the lines of a 1st v 2nd qualifying game in week 2.

WEEK 1 5 v 8 Elimination Game

6 v 7 Elimination Game


WEEK 2 an exact copy of the old top six format with 1 v 2 qualifying game and 3 v 6 and 4 v 5 elimination games


That would be much better than the current system.

But there does need to be some reward for finishing higher in the league if they do it in 2 lots of 4. The other option which i was originally in favour of was to revert back to the old top 8 approach of the premiership and make it 1v8, 2v7 etc.

Idont suppose bradford would have minded another round of super league?

what would be the point of another round of super league?

Perfect.

I think there is a tension between wanting to be fair to the team that finishes top and wanting the play-offs to be open and interesting.

The return of the Premiership is an interesting point. A third trophy for teams to qualify and compete for, while making the League leaders a 'real' trophy again makes sporting sense to me. Whether Sky would sacrifice the Grand Final is doubtful though.

1st vs 8th, 2nd vs 7th etc would be fine for the premiership, as the League Champions would already have their reward.

Talk about confusion

even hemmings got it wrong after the wakey cats game he said cats played huddersfield, then it appears they play KR ?

Cats play Huddersfield...rovers play Wigan or Cas




I think

The main problem for me is the devaluation of the league leaders trophy!
Why the feck did the RFL give the Championship trophy to Wigan to keep anyway since they bought success?
The whole point of a league is to prove who is best over a whole season, the play-off games are virtually a knock out comp for which we have one of those already. I don't give the GF winners more status than the old premiership simply because in effect the best team over a season doesn't automatically win the accolades (just ask saints for the previous 2 seasons)

I'd stick with top 8 and play old premiership style as some have mentioned already.
The advantage of finishing higher is a guaranteed home game and you get to play the teams finishing lower down.
The reasons it wont happen is simply MONEY, there are more games in this format which means more air time, more gate money etc etc

I have always said the best team of the season is the team that sits in 1st after all weekly rounds are over.
I have never bought this play-offs gimmick.

Lets look at it another way.

Assume Bradford had sneaked in this year, they have been truly awful just ask thier supporters. Now if they somehow managed against the odds to make the GF and win would eveyone say they were the best team this season??

Leeds have been far and away the best team however a slip up in the next game or the final and they will be classed as also rans.

Credit to the RFL for having the balls to try something different but this format does not work for me. The teams in 3rd and 4th have just the same advantage as the teams in 1st and 2nd (Apart from the home tie)

The older system worked much better with 1st and 2nd playing for the final and the loser then plays the winner of the chasing pack for a second bite at the cherry.

yup on saturday

Totally agree! The trophy that now resides permanently in Wigans Trophy Cabinet, should be presented to the team that finishes 1st in the table after the weekly rounds and that team should rightly be deemed 'Champions!' The team that wins at Old Trafford should be officially crowned 'Play-off Winners!'

Always preferred it when it was league championship and Premeirship myself. Think this whole format is rubbish personally

Me also. It gave teams something to play for at the end of the season while still recognising the best side over the course of the season.

That said, RL has actually decided it's champions via playoffs for many more years than not. So I guess you could say that the current system is more traditional.


Up until this season it was OK. Given that the weekly rounds had odd fixtures and not every team had the same fixtures it was difficult to justify awarding the championship to the side that finished top as they may have had an easier fixture list.

Now that we have all teams playing each other once home and away the side that finishes top is unquestionably the best team. Plus the 8 team format seems just daft.

Well I'm glad a lot of people on here aren't running the game, we'd have the most boring and dull seasons going with no money or interest at all.

Nobody cared about the Premiership trophy. So no-one would care about getting into the top 8. Therefore, the season would effectively be over for pretty much the ENTIRE Super League after about round 10. The play-offs create constant interest throughout the year, which is what brings the fans in.

Unlike football, we don't have enough teams at a high level to have qualification for decent competitions (i.e. Champions League and Europa League) as well as promotion and relegation between two full-time leagues to keep interest in the season going (as well as the ability to squeeze in enough fixtures in the season to have 4 or 5 competitions running).

Football have an excellent system, but we are not football. We don't have their coverage. We have to accept that we need to find ways to make the sport interesting, and the play-offs have shown this.

I fully agree and have always really enjoyed the play-offs for their intensity and the quality of rugby on offer as teams "peak". This weekend's games have been tedious, of poor quality and with very disappointing crowds, though.

I disagree about the games tbh, I really enjoyed the Wakefield Catalans game
and thought Wigan Cas tonight was a good one, bothe could have gone either way. Don't see how they where tedious though?

Attendances where poor though, wakey only had 4,008 and the DW wasn't exactly full.

I agree with the suggestions of going back to the previous style of 1v2 grand final eliminator, great rugby, full houses and cracking atmosphere, stil don't understand why that was changed, the old playoff format was a winner IMO.

The only decent game was the elimanator last night..the others were boring, not sure about this format, players appear not willing to put their bodies on the line, things should improve now the matches are eliminators.

I preferred the top 6 rather than 8, that said with no relegation the top 8 gives more meaning to some of the end of season games. I hate the fact that one side has to pick their opponents, that's gimmicky and crap.

So in your opinion, we were not Champions in 1956 & 1958, as we won the Championship final but didn't finish top of the regular standings in both of those years.

For those who are unaware, it should be pointed out that play-offs are not an invention of Sky, but have been in existence for the majority of the games history being first played for in 1907.

Of the 99 teams who have been crowned Champions (up to Oct 200icon_cool.gif, 66 achieved the feat via a play off system with 33 doing so in a first past the post set up. A 2 to 1 ratio in favour of a play off.

The old Premiership was only introduced in 1974 to compensate the loss of a play off at the seasons end. If it was reintroduced now it would have half the impact of the SL play offs with little attention being paid to it by the general media and a far far smaller crowd at Old Trafford to climax the season.

Having said all that, I still reckon it should have stayed as a top six play off. The fact that Bradford and ourselves could have still qualified with a couple of weeks remaining, despite having had dreadful seasons, doesn't say much for the standard of the competition.

I enjoyed the result on Friday too, but agree that the best game was last nights.

The first 4 games effectively meant nowt, so there was little intensity in either of them. Only Leeds looked like they wanted the week off.