That's certainly not going to happen - she's round at mine tonight for a ruby and a few cans.

You bar steward, she said she'd meet me in the Redoubt. I'll guess I'll just have to make do with that Beyonce.

Er....bad news mate

I agree with you Bren. Its not so much what the RFL have done, although there is certainly some preferential treatment, it is the total Bull that surrounded the announcement.
Stepping in to save an historic club I can stomach, but pretending that they want to save Odsal is unacceptable.
Along with the franchise system, has come the dissapearance of almost every traditional ground and with Wakey and Cas hoping to move, it leaves Headingley and Odsal as the remaining "traditional" grounds.
So much for tradition eh ?

Story of my life. I'll have to make do with Joshua Tetley & John Jameson and then back home to Mrs Sandal Cat.

sorry John but we should not let this drop that's what they want you to do

their act has gone too far for me, we all know how inept and corrupt they are they should be brought to book now

Todays paper .Quote HARD-UP BULLS IN A BRAD WAY .A day before the rfl announced they were taking over odsal from bradford bulls ,there was a buzz a big super league club was in trouble .Even to the point that a championship club had been put on standby to replace them . Sorry but it sounds like a bail out to me ,Wonder who the championship club was.

Not today's "paper" - it was Dozy Barker in the comic known as "The Sun".

If you read the whole piece of garbage, you can see quite clearly he is doing no more or less than you guys are. He has plenty of previous in adding 2+2 and making minus 47 as far as Bulls are concerned. And as far as you lot are concerned too. And he is almost always wrong. As you know as well as we do.

Now given that the lease would appear to have been signed late December, the LATEST this "buzz" could have been was late December. Hardly earlier this week, eh?

Go figure.

Calm down

Adey, are you acting independently as the RFL Bulls Minister of Information across all boards, or do you have assistants - junior ministers, if you will?

If you're doing this alone, I can only assume you've fuelled the last 48 hours on strong coffee and disco sherbet; you must be nearing exhaustion?

He's certainly on the ball is Adey.

[iThe RFL insists there are no plans to develop it into a national stadium or a 'Wembley of the north' in the near future. But sources say it is likely to be improved in the medium term. RFL Chairman Richard Lewis said: "This arrangement is absolutely the right thing to do because it safeguards the future of one of the sport's most famous stadia. "Odsal is famous throughout the world and it would be a tragedy were the venue to be lost to the sport in the way that other evocative rugby league venues have already been lost." [/i From the same comic. www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/sp ... inner.html Clearly, the stadium that featured as the backdrop to [ithe[/i iconic story/film about rugby league in our lifetime is not deemed quite as "evocative" as the hole in the hill, insofar as we either dump it or get dumped.

[iThe RFL insists there are no plans to develop it into a national stadium or a 'Wembley of the north' in the near future. But sources say it is likely to be improved in the medium term. RFL Chairman Richard Lewis said: "This arrangement is absolutely the right thing to do because it safeguards the future of one of the sport's most famous stadia. "Odsal is famous throughout the world and it would be a tragedy were the venue to be lost to the sport in the way that other evocative rugby league venues have already been lost." [/i From the same comic. www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/sp ... inner.html Clearly, the stadium that featured as the backdrop to [ithe[/i iconic story/film about rugby league in our lifetime is not deemed quite as "evocative" as the hole in the hill, insofar as we either dump it or get dumped.

I've a lot of sympathy with the RFL on this, because they were put in an impossible position.

They could have stood aside and let people take over Odsal with a view to seizing it as a land asset, just so as not to upset anyone in Wakey or Cas. Or else they could intervene and save Odsal. I commend them for it.

I believe that the decisions of the RFL are taken genuinely and for the benefit of the game, and this is one. It's that their vision of the betterment of the game isn't always the same as everyone else's.

Given that we have been awarded two franchises based upon unfulfilled promises to build a ground, it is hard to be too critical of them.

Sorry Slugger but we would have been Gonners this time round had it not been for Crusaders dropping out.

I agree, but people slate the press when they say the same.

Also, they could just have easily dumped us and given it to Halifax. They didn't. They have set criteria (the merits of those are for a different day) and they stuck to them, and so we finished ahead of Halifax.

The problem with the Crusaders 'withdrawal' is that it leaves questions unanswered and puts Wakefield in a poor light. If they had not withdrawn are we sure that they would have been given a franchise ahead of Wakefield? Were Wakefield the next worst application?
The party line of the press, and other clubs, is that if Crusaders hadn't withdrawn, Wakefield would not have got a licence; they can't prove this, but likewise we cannot prove a negative.
Unfortunately the lazy journalists have decided that this will be our strapline for the forseeable future.
"Wakefield Wildcats (sic), who were saved from relegation by the late withdrawal of Crusaders." regardless of (note to sub-ed: insert that posh word for truth that Bren2k is trying to get us to use).
It may even be our epitaph.

See it as a birth certificate, not an epitaph.

You only have to go back a few years and see Warrington as a struggling club, at around the same time that the Bulls were an all-conquering dynasty.

It is fine as a strapline if we have progressed.

Indeed. And the major part of that set criteria is stadia! Strange how the loss of an old delapidated stadium suddenly becomes such a problem!

This would have put a different "spin on the RFL's announcement, agreed it was taken from the Sun, but still:


Hard-up Bulls in a Brad way


A DAY before the RFL announced they were taking over the lease of Odsal from Bradford Bulls, there was a buzz a big Super League club was in trouble.

Even to the point that a Championship club had been put on standby to replace them.

The Bulls, who were for 10 years the prototype and glamour club of Super League with average gates of 16,000, never recovered financially from the expensive exercise of signing Iestyn Harris from Cardiff Blues.

Leeds Rhinos had a clause in his contract that if he came back to Super League he had to join them.

The Bulls ended up paying compensation plus massive legal fees.

Bradford also had their fingers burnt with Australian signings Glen Hall and Matt Orford, who never lived up to their reputations.

Gates have dropped to around 11,000 on a good day and maintenance of such a huge stadium — that once held 102,000-plus in 1954 for the Challenge Cup final replay — has taken a huge toll.

Read the previous page of this thread, where someone has already quoted that latest piece of lazy fiction from Parker. Then read my reply, including my reference to the new lease seemingly having been signed in DECEMBER. Odd indeed that there should be a "buzz" earlier this week, several weeks AFTER the deal was done?

You of all people should know better than to listen to that pillock?

I drove passed there in my bus today, they haven't changed it's name to RFL odsel yet, though there was a board that said "thank you for supporting the Bradford Bulls" must have been a message to red hall

its all forgotten now the seasons all ready for starting its like a quick sweep under the carpet

Timing of news is something the RFL are good at, like you say its yesterdays news.

Not by me and hopefully, not by lots of RL fans.

This whole episode is a massive kick in the knackers to every club that's performed financial gymnastics at the RFL's behest to divest themselves of their very own iconic stadia; and this right off the back of a fudged drug scandal and the giving away of 3 years of SL sponsorship for the princely sum of nil pounds and nil pence.

Our game is run by clowns and incompetents - one would hope that sooner or later, the SL club chairmen will lose faith with them and make their positions untenable; with the obvious exception of Bradford of course, who are now forever in the RFL's pocket.

Your chairman sold your stadium to developers.

Our chairman sold ours to the RFL.

Maybe if your chairman had not sold the stadium, the RFL could have taken over YOUR stadium too?

How would you have reacted then to charges that that action made franchising a joke and gave Wakey an unfair advantage at franchising time?

Don't blame the RFL because you had no interest in a stadium to sell.