fevnut's musings
Leagues
and Cups
With the Challenge
Cup final coming later this month our thoughts turned to the very sad decline
in the prestige of a great competition. We wondered why this might be.
A lot of
thought has made us come to the conclusion that the prime cause (and there are,
of course, others) is that it has lost the two prime features that made it so
special.
The first
of these was that the final had been a real ‘Festival of rugby league’ that
brought together fans from all clubs who would book their places months in
advance. Of course it was always extra special if their own club was involved
but many fans wanted to be there even if their team was not playing. It was the
highlight of the year.
But this
has been so severely weakened by two developments in recent years.
First of
all the ‘Festival of Rugby League’ element has been largely supplanted by the
Magic Weekend and the Summer Bash. This is usually a much shorter distance to
travel and guarantees that your own club will be involved.
Secondly,
the unique nature of the knock-out competition has been downgraded because what
was a league competition has now had a knock-out style element added in the
form of the play-offs.
And before
anyone puts the contrary argument that rugby league has had an end of season
play-off competition since almost the beginning of the twentieth century, those
play-offs were seen as a separate competition and there was hugely greater
standing to finishing top of the league than there is nowadays.
So what we
have ended up with is a mish-mash with no clear distinction between the nature
of lifting the league and cup trophies.
We have no
doubt at all that the inauguration of the 1895 cup is a very positive
development but even then it seems to us that, in its inaugural year, the
organisation has been badly mis-managed.
Club
identity
Outside
Super League the last few years have seen a crisis developing over the identity
of clubs and the perception of fans.
The concept
of ‘our team’ has been weakened by the increasing reliance on dual registration
and loan players leading to fans hardly recognising their own team from week to
week.
We did a
bit of research that has revealed that a staggering number of 160 players have
already played for more than one club so far this year. There were always
transfers and loans but the scale has got completely out of hand.
Out of that
number of 160 there are 20 players who have played for three different
clubs and some of those haven’t even made an appearance for their parent club!
But that is
not the end of it. There are two players who have played for four
different clubs. Twenty-year old forward Dan Hindmarsh is a London Broncos
player but in addition to playing for the Broncos he has also played on dual
reg for London Skolars, Coventry Bears and Sheffield Eagles. And it is exactly
the same story for London Broncos 20 year-old scrum-half James Meadows.
Rugby
League is a team game! It’s not played by a haphazard combination of players
but to be good needs to be played by a group who know how to interact with each
other under the leadership of a good coach.
How on
earth does it really aid the development of young players to have to take the field with four
separate groups of players and respond to direction from four different coaches
with very little chance to learn and with a lack of opportunity to develop relationships
with coaches and team mates?
So next
year we return to a reserve team competition. Let’s hope it brings to an end
the scale of this madness and bring back to the fans a better feeling of
identity with their team!
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