Match 30: Sheffield Eagles (Away) Championship Shield
fevnut's musings
Where did that come from?
Last Sunday we took our seats for
the match against Leigh full of dread! After the abject performances against
Batley and Rochdale how on earth were we going to compete with a Leigh team.
Despite the turmoil they had been thrown into following their failure to make
the qualifiers they had nevertheless won nine of their last ten games (the only
loss being to Toronto) and were on a run of 6 successive victories. Over those
ten games they had scored 414 points to 188 conceded. We thought they might
implode when it got to the Championship shield and the announcement of Derek
Beaumont that he was leaving and the departure of their captain and a number of
their top players. But they started the Shield by beating Sheffield 68-6 and
Barrow 38-0. The omens were poor enough even before we discovered that we going
into the game with only 14 players.
Sat there waiting for the game to
begin we soon discovered that there were plenty of others around us who were
also fearing a heavy loss. But then those 14 players turned out to be heroes.
Every single one of them! And not only were their 14 heroes but some of them
were superheroes. John Davies was utterly amazing and so were Ian Hardman, Josh
Hardcastle and Misi Taulapapa, who we felt played his greatest game ever for
Fev.
The greatest jubilation comes when
you are least expecting it. We can’t remember when we last left Post Office
Road feeling quite so jubilant.
But we are still searching unsuccessfully
for explanations. We were great in Toronto, awful against Batley and Rochdale
and fantastic against Leigh. Let’s just hope that we finish the season playing
like that and reward the fans after the disappointment of not making the Top 4.
League Structure
We have been thinking about how the
league structure should be shaped in the future. At the moment we cannot offer
solutions but we have come up with some principles.
1)
No change to be made for 2019. It makes us look shambolic to be
changing the structure now with less than a month of the season left. It’s
crazy to put several clubs now into a position where they don’t know what they
need to do to avoid relegation from the Championship or promotion from League 1
with three games to go.
2)
A level playing field in each league. Issues to be considered
here include both central funding levels and part-time teams competing with
full-time opposition.
3)
A fair competition with each club playing the others in their
league home and away and no ‘extra’ matches whether they be so called ‘loop’
fixtures or an extra game at Summer Bash or Magic Weekend.
4)
The return of a second knock-out competition such as the much
loved Yorkshire and Lancashire Cups. A much better way of producing extra
matches.
5)
Re-thinking about the development of new clubs in areas where
there is no tradition of rugby league as a professional spectator sport.
6)
Clear pathways for promotion and relegation with bottom club in
Super League and the Championship automatically promoted and top club in the Championship
and League One automatically promoted. This does not discount some possibility
of second promotion and relegation between the divisions.
We will try
and come up with our own proposals next week. Please feel free to respond with
your ideas. It would be great to hear the ideas of fans rather than Super
League chairmen and administrators.
No comments:
Post a Comment