Sadly the sport has been run by shysters ever since the disgusting Wigan bookie Maurice Lindsay got his hands on the game.
And hey did you know, both of my sporting teams won at Wembley for the first time, in the same year, 2016. Now then, who else can say that about their footy and rugby teams ?.
When this comes in it will kill the lower levels of the game. People won't pay X amount to watch Featherstone in Championship with no prospects. Gates will crash. Real shame because as stated before Featherstone have been on the up for a few years. Super League in all but status.
I was there, and there weren't many of US that thought Wigan were gonna lose! A brilliant day, sadly ruined when we came out of the ground and found Leicester had just put the final nail in Tarn's Premiership coffin.
We've said it on here before haven't we, how annoying Lindsay was and that he was given far too much power by the RL bosses. I'll never forget how he tried to force those club mergers on us all, and the fans were disgusted. Thankfully those plans were scrapped, otherwise it would have been Hull/Hull K.R, Warrington/Widnes, Bradford/Halifax, & Wakefield/Castleford/Featherstone.
I can't beat that but going to see both my teams same day, Sunday 7th May ,Reds v Posh 12 pm ko,Rovers v Eagles 3 pm ko.
Btw, was it Bradford or Huddersfield, who were asked to merge with Halifax, or was it all three ?. And another disgraceful decision was to deny Keighley promotion to the Super league once. They chose to send London up instead, in a pathetic waste of time and money attempt to promote the game down south.
Eagles Mk.1 were sacrificed to save the ailing Huddersfield. After all they'd achieved in such a short space of time they were just tossed aside. Yes, they forced a "merger" but everybody knew that "Huddersfield Sheffield Giants" would never work and it was obvious what their true intentions were.
Calder Valley Rangers... ffs... I ended up on a radio Leeds phone in at the time... they were bigging it up... they were saying the crowd would be big... assuming it would be an aggregate number of Trinity, Cas and Rovers crowds, I just pointed out how little they know about the fans and the history of the area..I told them hardly any would go.
We had to do the stupid merger thing as well with Gateshead, for a few years. But they eventually ran out of money and folded as a club, so we finally got our own club back again. Ohh and we adopted the ludicrous name of Sharks for a while, and thankfully dropped it. But I'd rather be a Shark than a Wildcat lol.
Yes I remember that, same time as Huddersfield Sheffield Giants. You were lucky to get your club back, we had to re-form.
I think back to when it was the old Stones bitter Championship, and the Silk cut Challenge cup, and the Regal trophy, and even the Slalom lager Alliance for non league teams. All those sponsors were to do with booze and fags, and Sky sports hadn't even been invented yet. Ohh and Huddersfield were the Barracuda's, yeah they were the good old days lol.