fevnut's blog: Fev v Barrow

Match 33: Barrow Raiders  (Home) 
Championship Shield

fevnut's musings

They have gone stark staring bonkers!

We want rugby league to be taken seriously as a great game that deserves and needs to attract many more players, spectators and media coverage.

But who can take it seriously when clubs start the season with the knowledge of the consequences for the following year and then it is all changed with less than a month to the season’s end. Of course, it didn’t affect Super League but it does make a very big difference to the clubs at the bottom end of the Championship and the top end of League One.

When they went to bed on Thursday September 13th, Rochdale Hornets knew that they were being relegated to League One in 2019 and at Swinton Lions it would take a miracle if they were not to suffer the same fate. Now, following the meeting on September 14th, one of them will remain in the Championship and the other will have to play a preposterous game against the losers of the League One play-off final a week after the season was due to end.

We all like holidays, but professional and semi-professional players can’t take theirs during the season so many book their holidays for straight after the season ends. And for semi-professional players that also means that they have to book their leave from work for their holidays.  Which players are affected by this crazy decision won’t be known until hours before some of them were due to go away. Maybe we will end up with promotion and relegation decided by a 7 a-side match! What makes it even worse is that the venue for this match is to be decided by the toss of a coin. Honestly, what a way to determine promotion and relegation.

Given that such a crazy scenario was decided upon it would have been better if the League One play-off final had been brought forward to the Wednesday and then the extra match could have been played on the following Sunday. Even then there is a possibility that some of the players from the relevant Championship club would have been away on holiday as they would have known for months that there season would be ending this coming Sunday. Maybe it would have been more sensible to say that, in the light of increasing the Championship teams to 14 that there would be no relegation this year. We don’t like that but anything would be better than the cock-eyed plan that was brought in.

We would like to see a simple rule introduced to the governance of rugby league. That no changes can be made to the structure for the following season once a season has begun.

Future Changes

Who believes that the structure cobbled together in September is there for a long time to come? If you do, then we think you are deluded bearing in mind the regular changes over the years. Surely the fans will find the Super League 'loopy' fixtures to be unattractive and we have no doubt that sooner rather than later there will be cries for them to be got rid of.

We do, however, believe that the reversion to the 1998 play-off configuration is very welcome. It provides real excitement with one club going out per week and also gives a real reward for finishing top of the league.

But there has to be a huge question mark over the structure of League One. Several journalists have written about how exciting it was, but they were only referring to the top end, the fight for the automatic promotion place between York and Bradford and the equally interesting battle to claim the play-off places. At the bottom end things look very different. Before this year the highest number of points conceded in the entire history going back to 1895 was the 1,604 shipped by Highfield in the 30 match second division season of 1994/95. Never before have three clubs in one league had over 1,000 points scored against them in the same season. It happened this year to Coventry Bears, Hemel Stags and West Wales Raiders with West Wales conceding a totally unprecedented 2,106 points. That’s more than 500 greater than the previous worst. In fact, West Wales have averaged more than a point a minute against them over the whole League One campaign.

This seems to tell us that the way these clubs have been brought into the professional game is deeply flawed. Of course we want to see professional clubs developing all over the UK but the current way of doing things simply doesn’t work.

Perhaps the answer would be 16 teams in each of Super League and the Championship underpinned by a Development/Recovery league (no, we wouldn’t call it that). Promotion from the bottom league would be subject to meeting certain criteria, such as a clearly strong and viable business plan, the team actually based in the area they purport to represent (Hemel Stags are currently based in Sheffield!) and a minimum average home crowd figure, possibly 500. Being in such a league would allow these clubs to grow and strengthen and in the knowledge that they need to develop before they can make progress.

There were also four Championship teams who conceded over 1,000 points in 2018, Barrow Raiders, Sheffield Eagles, Rochdale Hornets and Swinton Lions suffering that ignominy. That re-inforces the point we made previously that the Championship has become two separate leagues in one with the bottom teams being regularly beaten by a very large margin when playing those at the top.

Astonishing and very worrying

To illustrate the point we are making we want to put on record a statistic that no-one seems to have published so far. Seven clubs recorded their highest ever score against West Wales this year. They are York City Knights (144), Bradford Bulls (124), Keighley Cougars (112), Doncaster (102), Oldham (102), Newcastle Thunder (98) and Coventry Bears (64).

But it doesn’t end there because Hunslet (86) and London Skolars (76) equalled their record highest score and Whitehaven (84) recorded their highest score in the summer era.