Re: Whats the future for the Pro game? : Tue May 10, 2011 7:40 am
There have been some very good posts on this subject. My club are now in SL after extensive rebuilding and under new ownership. There are others on the way to doing that as well, but the biggest handicap to actually doing it is the gulf which the RFL have created between SL and the Championship, which goes back to the "ideal" plan for Rugby League put forward by Murdoch by his mouthpiece Maurice Lindsay in 1995, which, as you will remember, wanted to reduce the number of Heartland clubs by mergers -- unlikely ones at that,-- and "invent" other clubs outside of the traditional areas. While there is nothing wrong with expanding the game into other areas the idea should have been the natural expansion from within rather than setting up a club outside of the rules applying to other clubs --- quota, funding from the RFL, etc.There has to be more funding from the RFL to Championship Clubs even at the expense of SL which should allow the salary cap of the Championship clubs to narrow the gap between them and SL, and there has to be an increase of the number of clubs in SL to 16 with promotion and relegation reintroduced.