https://www.loverugbyleague.com/post/co ... -joke-now/

https://www.loverugbyleague.com/post/co ... -joke-now/

Didn’t say it would, but those young players then become experienced players over time and would be in line for that extra money. So let’s raise the cap to make sure youngsters don’t look at the gap between RU and RL wages and opt for RU.....that’s if people are truely concerned about losing youngsters from the game as a whole rather than the more likely just worried about THEIR club losing a player who could’ve been a star for them.

I don't understand why reserve teams often get talked about as some sort of panacea to various problems, when it's far from it. I certainly don't think that it should be mandatory - there are many ways to skin this particular cat and clubs should be allowed to do what they believe is the most effective thing for them.

Even when the reserves / alliance leagues were around, Leeds never really took them seriously, yet only the biggest of trolls could argue that Leeds haven't contributed their fair share to the game's talent pool in the SL era. The belief at the club has been and still is that it was better for young players to come out of the Academy team and serve their apprenticeship playing first team rugby (wherever that was), rather than playing fellow kids in the reserves. In the early days of Super League, Bramley were effectively Leeds' reserve team, and later on the club sent batches of players to London Broncos, Hunslet and Featherstone. In general, it has served the club well.

I think that's one reason why Leeds prefer dual registration and loans to a reserve team. I would argue that Mikolaj Oledzki would have learnt much more playing against men in the Championship / L1 at Bradford that he would have done playing fellow 21-year-olds in the reserves. Luke Briscoe's career seems to have been reinvigorated by his time at Featherstone. Brad Dwyer also earned his Leeds shirt back after impressing at Fev. Jordan Lilley needs to learn how to really marshall a team around a field, and I think he's better served doing that at Bradford or Featherstone. You get the idea.

I get the argument for reserves but in reality, clubs should be free to find the way to build the player development pathways that work for them. That said, there needs to be some form of monitoring in place to make sure that clubs don't just see the scrapping of reserves as a 'cost cutting' exercise. If you don't want to run a reserve team then fine, but you still need to demonstrate that you are developing players to elite level standard by whatever means you choose.

So if Wakey, Hull, Halifax and Bradford are running one and Wigan, Saints and Warrington want to then you e got 7 teams there, THAT IS ENOUGH to have a league.

Play each team 4 times a year (2x home 2x away) that’s 24 fixtures.....PLENTY. Doesn’t matter about “loop fixtures” because it’s meant to be about game time and looking at youngsters for longer. It’s not about audience figures and sponsorship deals that would require more variety. If it a success then you probably see more join the next year and grow.

That they can’t and haven’t managed to do this in the 4 years or so is a COMPLETE FAILURE by the clubs involved who want it that they can’t organise something so simple. But instead of looking at themselves they blame other clubs.

Their’s been cancelling of fixtures every year since reserves have been reintroduced because of injuries even with such limited fixtures yet somehow teams think they can fulfill weekly reserve fixtures when they will definitely pick up many more injuries with more games.

It's not that they don't have £30k spare. It's that they believe that said £30k delivers a bigger return on investment elsewhere.

i dont see a problem with how the structure is now

if some teams want to have a huge squad that then their players dont get much game time thats their fault

the structure now is fine, the academy's are working and nothing wrong with going out on loan, see many players still make it if good enough

I’d also mention players who moved on who probably wouldn’t have if we had reserves. The constant argument is that players are lost to the game but doesn’t stack up. Rob Mulhern left to get game time lower down SL at HKR, had to do a season in the Championship with now back again and in the England Knights squad and one of the promising young props in the competition. Alex Foster left, went to London and then ended up at Cas playing in a GF and part of a LLS winning team. Luke Gale could’ve sat in our reserves endlessly hoping for a chance that probably would never come behind McGuire, Burrow and Sinfield, but instead he went away lower down and worked his way up to Man of Steel.

Would these happen if we keep them? At least shows that not making it at your academy club isn’t the “lost to the game” fearmongering that pro Reserve supporters like to portray. Leeds are prepared to miss out on a player and another club benefit rather than have him hanging around for selfish reasons of filling out our reserves. Teams like Leeds get accused of cherry picking all the best young talent then people complain when we don’t try and keep them all for ourselves for longer.

What's the £30k cover? Doesn't seem realistic somehow.

Wakefield receive financial penalties for playing at B.V. maybe those clubs who refuse to have a reserve team should face a similar penalty?

So what would happen of most clubs decided to stop running academies?


Regarding reserves, as another poster put, yes a young player going out on loan to a championship/L1 club will benefit them so much more than playing a reserve game. But that's for those who are ready and developed at 19.

The reserve game isn't designed to be a high level necessarily. It's to allow those who are too old to play academy, to continue playing rugby. Not everyone is physically developed like an Oledzki, Burgess etc at 19.

Also some of those who the club does deem good enough but then have no where to play get shipped from pillar to post. Jordan Lilley played for about 4 clubs last year. How is that good for a young kid? Watch an interview when he signs with us. He'd fallen out of love with RL. This is a kid who probably lived, breathed RL since 5. Yet he wanted to walk away together. Whether he's good enough is irrelevant. He's probably found his level with us. But its about trying to keep as many in the game at possible. Making a decision on players at 19 is farcical IMO

No clubs have expressed such a thing so pointless question because it won’t happen.



You make it sound like the whole of RL has made a decision on a 19 year old, they haven’t, one club has and the player can and do move on to another.club.

Lilley did seem to fall out of love with the game. Can we guarantee that wouldn’t happen if he spent the next few years playing in Leeds’ reserves hoping for the odd game or two a season playing against mostly kids before being let go a few years later rather than move on now? Keeping plenty of players on (many who clearly won’t be good enough for the club’s 1st team) to have enough to fulfill fixtures just to have a look at one or two in the hope they show more is just selfishness by the clubs.

Wigan had to hastily arrange a reserves fixture last year to get Manfredi some game time to shake off the rust, because he can't play in the U19s. The gap between 16 year olds and 19 year olds is massive, but they're lumped into 1 team together because of the lack of reserve teams. Yes, Dual Reg & Loans are options, but this relies on having good relationships with other clubs. There's no point sending out a 20 year old kid you're looking at as your next ball handling loose forward if the DR team wants to play them as a 3rd prop.

Just rebrand the u19s to the reserve league, and allow a certain number of overage players to play.
We barely have enough players in the player pool to fill the competitions we have. Having a reserve league would just dilute the quality of the u19s and championship clubs.

I can deny you it, 20 plus years of talking bollox about a new stadium thats no closer yet to even having a spade stuck in the ground does not constitute doing something about it.

Going on teams running a reserve side and teams that say they want to - Wakey, Hull, Halifax, Bradford, Wigan, Saints, Warrington, do the following fixture list (using Wigan as an example)

- Wakey (a)
- Wire (h)
- Bradford (a)
- Hull (h)
- Bye
- Saints (a)
- Halifax (h)
- Wakey (h)
- Wire (a)
- Bradford (h)
- Hull (a)
- Bye
- Saints (h)
- Halifax (a)

Repeat over for 24 games over the year, that’s plenty as you probably won’t want any over Easter as your 1st team squad is usually stretched over that period. Easy, stop making complaints it’s not doable if all teams aren’t running a reserve team.

What you say would be fine, other than Wigan, Warrington and St Helens have said that they'd like to run a reserves team, but because of the lack of other teams they won't be (at least that's how I've read it).

Another poster questioned how a reserves team could be run on £30k. The realistic answer to that is that you probably can't run both reserve and academy teams and have a budget like that. I'm not privy to the numbers, but the Fax reserve team is basically an academy team that's not restricted by age limits. Most players will be on low appearance wages or already signed on for the club on a 1st team contract. The £30k (last I heard was £25k for Fax) will mainly be for the logistics of running the team and other incidentals (coach travel, playing kit etc.).

But I’ve just shown their isn’t a lack of teams to make a full fixture list out of it, they’ll know which teams are running a team and know which want to do from previous SL owners meetings, why can’t these clubs come up with the fixture list I just did?

Why can it only apparently work if you play all other 11 SL clubs home and away once which seems to be what people want with mandatory reserve sides.

If all 12 SL clubs have reserve sides where does that leave the likes of Halifax and Bradford? Not included at the top table as SL clubs can just mirror the reserve fixtures with their 1st team fixtures?

For me it would be great to get a large proportion of SL teams playing a reserve team, it doesn't matter that much in the grand scheme if some don't. But I know Hull have signed extra players to have a squad big enough to run a reserves and when they agreed to come back apparently they were told, as we were, that there was going to be a proper set of fixtures and more teams committing to it and the opposites happened. If the teams like Wigan, Wire & Saints who seem up for reserves committed this season, it would have been at least a good number of games for players that aren't going to make the 1st team and 1st-year players to get game time & thus serve its purpose.

If Wigan, Warrington and Saints join the party then you're right that it makes a viable round robin for everyone. The problem is that those three teams "appear" to be retracting their support for the concept, which leaves the remaining 4 clubs in a pickle.

Didn't realise you were part of the Club or the Trust that has spent god knows how many hours over the years trying to get a stadium sorted. Yeah, you must be spot on though, no one at the Club or those people that have helped have done anything at all, just pretending & talking bollox. If only Wakefield had a Council half as willing to help the City's sports teams (or in Wakefield's case to just get a developer to fulfill his S106 promise after being gifted greenbelt land to build a Community stadium and other facilities as well as warehousing) as much as Leeds City Council hey.

Why don't you go and ask one of your fellow Leeds supporters 'Inflatable Armadillo' how much time and effort he's put in just personally these past 6/7 years as part of and now Head of the Community Trust?

Before that, was it Trinity talking bollox about building a sports Village in Thornes park for a year or more, to then pull the plug, no that was WMDC. Or the idea of building one at the top of Queens Drive/ Dewsbury Road, no that was WMDC again. Even since Newmarket the Council has yet come up with a cunning plan to build a stadium around the back of Peacock estate, no seriously.

Belle Vue ranks close to the bottom of the grounds I'd like to watch a game of RL, It's a close call between Belle Vue and Odsal.

For what it's worth, Leeds City Council hasn't put any finance into the development work at Headingley.

The council has underwritten an investment vehicle to support Yorkshire CCC, (who haven't got a pot to i and would have lost Test status due to not being able to fund their share of the joint stand), but the work at Headingley is being funded by the club's own reserves and private financing.

So mods what has this to do with the topic?

Double standard as ever where Wakefield are concerned

Does it even shock you?