Hi all: just a little question for you about loop fixtures (please submit your answers to the poll. If it works......).

Personally, I hate them! For the following reasons:
- Unfair and unequal for teams who are at both extremes of the table, where final points really matter
- Cheapens games if you play the same team 3-6 times per season
- Needless extension of the season, which could be replaced with more exciting alternatives that might be better for the game e.g. annual set-in-stone Internationals week or Regional/SoO-style week. (or maybe even starting the season once the snow has gone)

Thoughts?

Money is often quoted as the reason for them. But why is this so?
And where should the line be drawn between Money and Fairness/Common Sense? If clubs could get more money for players playing on pongo sticks, do we think that would also be worth a go?

when you say, they never used to happen, is that disregarding the previous 17 or so years that they've been happening?

20 years, even

There's a bit of rose tinting here - even pre SL you could well end up playing the same team several times per season: twice in the league, Challenge Cup, John Player/Regal Trophy and County Cup (Lancashire/Yorkshire), Premiership play-offs, Floodlit Trophy, etc.

i recognise that drawing a team in a knockout is slightly different than a predetermined "loop" fixture, but given the relatively small pool of teams, together with more knockout cups, repetition did happen in the past.

I'm not a fan of predetermined 'loop fixtures' so generally agree with you, but the idea of playing on a "pongo stick" just stinks

Yes, you're right. Sorry for the crap spelling.

Why not just add a couple more teams to the League.....makes sense to me

Because the SL chairman won’t share the decreasing sky money they receive. So instead you get a ‘wigan v Saints derby’ 5 times a season and they wonder why attendance figures are dropping (pre-covid).

I’m not saying adding extra teams is the fix but SL chairman are not going to vote to spread the thin even thinner. We’ve already seen that in them pulling the money from the championship

I know that they don't like sharing the pot 'o gold, but as business men, I'm stunned they can't see they need to arrest the decline or they'll end up with a six team league or a merger with the Puntmonkies (who are discovering that Union has largely the same problems). What was wrong with just switching the old 16 team First Division to Summer, without all the other e!

You raised this on another thread. Do we reduce the clubs share of an already heavily reduced SKY deal further??

I could see SKY avoiding showing the bottom four clubs and their struggles, and if that happened the other SL clubs would question how do these extra clubs justify getting any SKY money. I can remember when London were in Superleague and were slaughtered weekly in the 2014 season? they didn't earn a penny of the SKY money

We must ensure the TV audience sees competitive games week in and week out hence the salary cap.

Sorry, I missed your post, so please take mine as agreeing with you.....

They can go down to ten and this was suggested a few seasons back. Ten is the lower limit. They voted more recently on making Superleage 2 x 10 but that got defeated.

Again we have to provide quality and competetiveness to the TV deal (Jamie Peacock made this clear) The thinking may well be that as we already get away with playing each other 3 times in a number of fixtures, we may as well go the full extent on this. Everyone play each other 3 times, ensure all the derbies are played three times, ensure that we don't have to offer SKY two poor clubs playing when we can offer them another Wiganv.v.Saints.

But therein lies the problem - many of us purists will say "Oh no not wigan and saints again" ...and we would be much much happier if say if Salford and Leigh were on instead. But the question is which of these two fixtures on SKY would draw the biggest TV audience? Wigan and saints yet again for the third time (AND they played each other on the BBC in the cup), or a look at Salford and Leigh for the first time on TV in the season??

No apologies required MR it made me smile.

As a poster of a certain age, one old enough to remember the pogo stick as a 1970's fashionable 'toy' (instrument of torture more like) I never understood it's popularity