The Virtual Terrace • Magic weekend and the Relegation Question.
wrencat1873 wrote:
Expansion in the UK has failed due to lack of will to make it happen and more importantly, the lack of serious cash to make it a success plus, if you go back a little way, expansion was foiled at every turn by dark forces from the other code which, had they worked as hard to solve the broken time payments issue, would have meant that RL would never have been a sport.
Interesting that you site "lack of players" and yet bang the drum for the N. American sides to entice players from over here to fill their roster.
Unfortunately, Union, with its seemingly endless supply of cash is smothering our sport and you have schools in Yorkshire being promised grants from Union to encourage some schools to drop RL from their curriculum but, we mustn't play the victim .
RL showed it's true colours when allowing Sheffield to "merge" with Huddersfield and Gateshead to "merge" with Hull but, fundamentally, we suffer through lack of cash / investment.
There should be a grown up discussion on where the sport would like to be in 5 /10/ 20 years time but, this either doesn't happen at all or it's on the bag fag packet in our new leaders pocket.
Yourself and others bang on about us having had 120 years to do whatever and I would suggest that RL greatest achievement has been to help Union go global.
By "stealing their players on a regular basis through the 70', 80's and 90's, they decided to turn their "amateur" game into a pro sport and sadly, with the huge resources at their disposal, RL has become ever more marginalised.
The game hasn't had any kind of proper plan for over 40 years and until some of those, who are paid significant money actually hatch a realistic way forward, change will not happen.
Again, we have lots of problems, lots of excuses, but not a lot of ideas to change things for the better.
There are various reasons why certain expansion ventures have failed but lets not pretend that heartland clubs are any less vulnerable to the whims of benevolent owners. The situation at Leigh last year is evidence of that.
But it doesn't do the sport any favours to obsess about the rights and wrongs of the past. It doesn't change the harsh realities facing the sport. The sport can't influence what the RFU and its clubs do or don't do and you need to get over yourself if you believe that RU went (publically) professional because it saw what RL was doing. RU went pro because it saw the commercial opportunities that it would bring. What RL needs to focus on is how it can change its own destiny, not what those big, bad evil forces were doing.
I mention players because the facts don't lie. Participation in this sport in the UK is falling, it's falling fast, and something needs to be done to address that. One of those things that can be done is to introduce the sport to new areas where there are potentially untapped talent pools - why can't North America be one of those? Let's get over this idea that our players can only come from the M62 corridor because the facts are that we're getting fewer and fewer players from those areas.
Yes, Toronto in their whopping 2.5 years of existence haven't produced much in the way of professional-ready talent, but that doesn't mean that all attempts to take the game to young people in other parts of the world should be consigned to the "can't work, won't work" pile. Toronto's priorities are clearly about getting into SL quickly, and that's there perogative.
And you know what? If this sport can offer young men in their 20s the opportunity to play and live in some of the most exciting cities in North America (NY have commited to being predominantly US-based), then that's a huge attraction to anyone playing this game. I know I'd jump at the chance for a contract to spend a few years of my 20s in New York City. What an incredible life experience that this sport can now offer young talent.
For all the talk of "expansion strategies", the reality is that the RFL or SL isn't in a position to do that without willing stakeholders like David Argyle and Eric Perez and, given that it is there investment, its right that they get a say in how and where they run their respective clubs.
And the point still stands that the very issue of expansion is only on the agenda because of failures at club level - failures to grow audiences, engage communities and to reach audiences that sponsors want to reach today. It is they that have got the sport to the state it is in today and at some point, we have to start listing to someone with better ideas, rather than those who just want to talk about problems and keep doing the same things that got us here.
Statistics: Posted by bramleyrhino — Wed Apr 17, 2019 2:12 pm — Replies 225 — Views 7426