TBH tb you are wasting your time I have been stating that for ages some folks just wont belive it.

Because any case against the RFL stops em competing in a RL comp, Well that and the fact any club that applies has to sign away any right to appeal.

Unfortunately for the game, that is probably a better bid than a couple could put in.

If its Quins they'll both have to hire some friends to join them

tbh im not expecting any huge suprise when it comes to decision day,i think it goes without saying that wakefield must be huge favourites to go down and i dont see what halifax could add to the competion in a area that already has two super league teams "bradford and hudds".

to answer the original question their will be trouble only if a team is unjustly ommitted.

If this is the case then Fax may as well just give up, what message would it send to any other club who is willing to spend to get up to the SL criteria only to be told 'sorry, until xxxxxx or yyyyyy clubs are in a worse position,, you cannot come in'

TBH i think the biggest thing will be the short term after the decision. Initially you can expect a massive drop off in fans who think why bother the hardcore will rally around the club obviously but how many.

Secondly away travel will probably drop like a stone.

thirdly on field performance will probably go up. (the paradox of the situation) How many of the guys will have clauses in their contracts giving them an opt out if the club drops out of the top flight? This is a very common clause in football and i'm sure many of the big named stars of RL will not want to be out of SL and damaging their earning power.

So they realise they will be looking for a new job for next season so really pull out all the stops to get their £££ up and hope to get scooped up by either the vikings (who will probably take a lot of them) or a big club.

This will then probably lead to the return of the fans a team winning and playing well is of course entertaining.

Towards the end of the season on field performance i would expect to falter. why? well the guys will be thinking of other things. Moving house? Kids to a new school? Yes this sort of thing happens all the time and never affects a team that much however your talking about the whole team with their minds on other things.

As for the future i see it one of 2 ways. either the club that drops will fall off a cliff and probably never recover with places like wake in massive trouble. (do you honestly think the council/funding will approve a 10k stadium for use in CC rugby with over half it probably being empty all season? especially in these times of tight dness)

Or the team that falls pulls its socks up has a serious audit of the backroom and board cuts deadwood and hangers on (ruthlessly) and rises like a pheonix.

If its Quins it will plummet how exactly

That isn't what Brayton Tiger suggested, and certainly isn't what SL say.

In fact, the fact that Fax get reviewed along with the existing SL clubs, shows that it entirely isn't the case.

If a club can bring something substantial to the league and the sport by being in SL, they'll get in.

Those kind of waivers has never stopped judicial reviews in the past - look at what Spurs are about to do with the Olympic Stadium as one example.

As far as I'm aware there's nothing in the operational rules that specifically stops a club from competing if they decide to go to the courts against the RFL - unless you can point to something? There's also other avenues open to any team such as CAS etc.

As far as I'm aware no sporting team has ever lost it's top flight status because of what they wrote in a bid - this is the situation that the RFL look to be going down and given the issues with a number of teams under threat, whoever gets cut loose may feel they have nothing to lose.

Not worth the paper it's written on if someone can prove the the client organisation hasn't followed it's own rules or acted fairly - hence why we have judicial reviews and organisations going to court over flawed procurement processes etc.

However that judicial review is not against the FA

I know it's not. I said that the kind of standard "waivers" mentioned don't mean you can't challenge a decision through the courts, which is what was implied.

In which case i misunderstood what was said above. I took it as being They couldn't seek judicial Review against the RFL without it affecting their positions in the competition. (regardless of waiver) In which case your example of spurs judicial review is not relevant to the example as its not against the governing body.

But i've just got up and need more coffee

I always need more coffee.



The Spurs example as you say was just to show that waivers don't stop a legal challenge. In terms of not being able to challenge the RFL, there's nothing I can find that rules it out, but other may know of something. Also it's why there is the Court for Arbitration in Sport etc.

We're in unchartered territory for everybody re someone getting kicked out of SL because of non-playing criteria when they haven't broken any rule, hence why the assumption of what clubs can and can't do, or will or won't, may not be as black and white as assumed. Throw the RFL into the mix and you have a recipe for disaster when it comes to following "due process".

I can't point to any rules but both Keighley and Batley contested the right to enter SL at its formation and were both told that they would not be allowed to compete until the case was concluded (which could have been months).

Fax aren't being reviewed with anybody , they are there to give the process a weird kind of ' justification ' , they were encouraged by the RFL to post a ridiculous attendance in their last league fixture of 2010 to pass the criteria , now we know why

interesting thing is though this is the first time i can recall where by a team is being kicked out. In all previous examples it seems to have been teams wanting to get in.

Effectively 1 teams will be told your not playing SL say goodbye to Sky money oh and we'll be restricting you salary cap etc. It could get very very messy if the RFL are called to account as a court would probably demand access to all license applications to judge them themselves. If the demoted teams applications was shown to be equal to or better than a current side then their will be problems.

The clubs are as keeps being mentioned business's the RFL will effectively restrict their earnings. If i was in charge of a club i'd be demanding a parachute payment equiverlant to lost sky money, lost revenue from tickets based on the average the club achieved in SL and the average of a cc club. The estimated loss of sponsorship caused by the lower coverage. not to mention all other CC clubs then demanding extra funding as it would be unfair on them to try to compete against a club getting a massive pay off from the RFL.

There was an incident around 7 years ago where 2 div 1 Ru teams played a game and it went to uncontested scrums while one team was down to 14 players (red carded if i remember) a front row went down "injured" leading to the advantage of a man down in the scrum being wiped out.

The team who had 15 on the pitch felt that the decision to go to uncontested scrums was taking too quickly and cost them the game and 2points in the league which dropped them 1 place and they estimated each place in the league = 80k in sponsorship they then made moves to sue the ref for loss of earnings.

Never heard how far it got but the ref was bricking it.

Some of Wakey's fans ran onto the pitch and taunted the Cas fan, when Wakey lost the relegation four pointer a few of years back.

Cas have already beaten Huddersfield this season.

If its Wakey then i'll sulk and blame the RFL/SL and all the other clubs, maybe even the global warming.


Then i'll stop sulking and blaming and wander down to BV, ask for a season ticket for next year, order a new shirt "without SL on it" and visit some grounds i've not been to for a while.

I will wear my clubs colours with pride and support the team.

What more can a fan do.

Irrespective of whether the franchise system is good or bad for RL the way the RFL have handled the franchise allocations this time round is farcical.
To begin with they announced however long ago that a current SL club was being replaced come what may and SL would remain at 14 teams. This meant that either one club could not save themselves however well they did with their stadium project/junior development/whatever, or if every club did better than expected the RFL was going to have to back-track yet again, keep all the SL clubs and announce an increase to 15 or 16 teams.
Then they made a big deal about the fact that they would announce the lucky Championship club early so as to give this club enough time to prepare for SL the following season but have now said a second Championship club is still in with a chance but for some reason known only unto themselves this second club (Fax) will be denied the preparation time advantages given to the first choice Championship club (Widnes) should they get in.
Finally, just to cap it all, they are going to announce which SL club is demoted part way through the season which will make that particular club's remaining on field results meaningless to them and having a bearing on how they perform for the rest of the season and affecting crowds and income not just for them but for their opponents. Its inconceivable that the demoted club's fans will not protest so why on earth would you allow them to protest whilst the season is in full swing when they will create enormous bad publicity for the sport?
Lewis, Rimmer & Wood you are a bunch of buffoons.

I half agree with you (except to point out that it was the current 14 SL clubs who voted to keep the numbers at 14, knowing that a championship was definitely guaranteed one of those spots) rather than share the TV money among more clubs.

If I was running this round of franchises I wouldn't have said there's definitely a guaranteed spot for a championship club irrespective, I wouldn't have run two separate application processes and I wouldn't have allowed the SL clubs to set the numbers in stone.

I'd have said: there's every chance of a championship club coming up if they're good enough across the whole club, I'd have run the application in one tranche and said: the number of successful clubs will be decided by the number of applications which are good enough: it could be 13, 14, 15 or 16.

To do that, it would have needed to be run earlier (around the timescale of the Championship clubs thiss time round, imo).

That wouldn't have solved your complaint about any team losing it's SL licence playing a large chunk of the season knowing they wouldn't be in SL next year – but frankly that happened under P&R as wel (look at Leigh's year in SL or Fax's last year in SL) and it's an inevitable part of any licensing process, unless you keep everybody waiting and unsure until after the season is over (which would give no-one time to prepare).

Agree entirely. WRT your point about P&R creating a situation where the team likely to be relegated is clear long before the end of the season that's true sometimes, but the counter example is of course our second relegation which went right to the end of the season and created great excitement for all concerned. No-one could play Cas or Wakey and not expect either team to be giving their all at the end of that season. This was 'real' sport. Demotion via the franchise system is artificial. Anyway got to go listen to the lads v Hull. Thank God for internet radio!

Yes you are correct , on a few occasions clubs have known they were going down well before the end of the season ( I knew Leigh were coming back down before the season started

) , but fans will happily accept what they see happen ON the pitch , because there is no argument about it , is there ?

Unlike the corrupt and obscene system we are watching unfold before our eyes this year , where Fax are having a carrot dangled before their eyes for another 4 months just to try to put a positive spin on what is basically an execution ,