It shows how far our sport has come in the professional era when we all appear to have great confidence in the way our sport is administered at the highest level. Yes it's not perfect but there is some great work being done that gets buried by the usual terrorists.

I don't have great confidence in the way the sport is administered, it's a mixed bag. There are positive steps forward but then these are marred by amateurish behaviour. BARLA is the architect of its own downfall because of its insular and self-interested attitude, if it had genuinely been interested in widespread amateur development at all levels and in all areas it would have been better for the whole of rugby league.

In fifteen years of dealing with Barla and enduring far too many tedious meetings I'm struggling to think of any case where Barla blazers actually made a decision that would encourage or enable anyone to play the game. Practically every situation I can recall has been about stopping players/clubs playing and restricting players freedom of choice.

I've also found that many of the officials are committee men/women who have a love for their organisation and its political struggles. Some have very (and too obvious) biases to their own club/town/league or their own Barla "careers". Most have never played and I've not met one who appears to have a genuine enthusiasm for and love of the game.

Barla was needed...but the situation is "evolve or die" and they keep looking backwards.

Actually sorry I'll give you that the RFL caused the problem by poor planning of the league, just it was clear the season started 3 weeks early for some clubs, so they'll need to shorten the league and find another competition for Bramley etc (obviously NRC would be ideal), although knowing the RFL they'll do the former and not the latter. It does noone any favours though to have 5 effective walkovers in the first 3 weeks, though if they deducted points and awarded the match, and expelled teams for scratching thrice in a season, then teams like Underbank would be less likely to take the mickey, as the current system rewards what they did. Of course the real ideal situation would be to find better run teams to replace the poorly run teams, but that will be difficult as the current league has a poor reputation among both good NCL/BARLA clubs and RLC Premier sides, whihc is a shame as there's a lot of well run clubs as well, so it would have to be an en masse change to a championship 2 or something, but not sure how that could work. Not likely now but with the NCL running summer pilots, it is likely that some strong clubs will want a decent summer league at some point in the future

I wouldn't let the RFL run a bath.

However BARLA wouldn't have a clue where the bath was in the first place.

Yeah perhaps I should have said improved confidence. I think the jury is still out on Wood but Lewis I think has been good for our game.

And why would BARLA want to do that? They can be such idiots.

Aren't BARLA GB playing Samoa on Monday?