I’m sure money is tight but it is for everyone in this division – even Toronto have had an issue.

Look at Fax who will have to do some cloth cutting of their own now it looks like they’ll finish outside the 5 for the first time in a while. They might have to lose players to plug the gap.

I guess we all hope that Chalmers hasn’t adopted the “poop or bust” aim to get in the play offs that worked so well for Marc Green.

I’m just happy to see is make steady improvements and avoid any financial issues. Let’s avoid those dramas and aim for top 5 next season. It’s do-able. We can think about further ambitions after that.

Well, yeah. Odsal is a big drag on the club's finances even if we're only catching the maintenance costs - in so much as we're actually paying any at the moment as we do seem to be in one of those 'steady as she goes, we don't really need to do that at this point', sort of stages. Even the floodlights, which were totally inadequate in the darker early season were only done by a company 'sponsoring' the new lights. And then it was only about 4 or 5 new bulbs...

There are so many rumours floating about regarding 'plans' which various people, people with a serious vested interest like the RFL and the Council, are thought to be suggesting and, of course, concrete and steel crush-barriers take such a long time to disintegrate we can, presumably, afford to hang on a while and see what transpires, I guess....

It's an old journalist trick if they have no news. They then approach the club/person and ask them to confirm the story. You then get a story as "Bulls deny financial problems" and everyone jumps to the conclusion that there is no smoke without fire. If you don't comment you then get the story "Bulls refuse to comment on financial problems". Journo gets a story and club are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Well summed up rugbyreddog.

As for Odsal I remember Peter Hood saying that it was a drain on finances when we were getting much bigger crowds and had all the SL TV money coming in. Now we’ve got a championship team on a tiny fraction of that income and we’re still in the same ground. It’s no wonder it’s been left to rot. I wonder though how long we can stay there before some serious money needs to be spent on things we can’t do without like the stand roof and crush barriers? There could be some big bills around the corner.

Perhaps Chalmers can see this coming and is trying to negotiate in public to get some progress with the ground? Whether that tactic works is open to debate.

Would getting into the top 5 really be that much of a cash boost?
Let's say we finish 5th, that gets us a knockout game away to whoever finishes 2nd. If that happens to be Toulouse and we get beat, then you're looking at the prospect of an away trip to France (costly) and then your season is over - where is the financial gain coming from in this scenario?

It's very different to seasons gone by where a top 4 finish would guarantee 7 additional games with several of them against teams from the higher division. I can obviously see the financial benefit there, but now? I'm not seeing it unless by some small miracle we go on a winning run to the final.

5th place would have landed us an away trip to who ever finishes 4th not who finishes 2nd.

There is more prize money for finishing higher up the table. I think there's a bit of a difference between 5th and 6th funding.

I was expecting us to just consolidate this season, playoffs would have been a bonus, but i think 6th all things considers should be classed as a good season.


York have bent the rule book by finishing so high but still very unlikely they will go up.

Not sure how they've bent the rule book. With Yorks run in, think they'll probably finish 5th though, so 6th isn't outrageous and I'm sure plenty of our young players will have learnt a lot this season. Get the FB situation sorted and hopefully have a consistent 6/7,s should see us improve.

The play-offs aren't completely out of reach just yet.

Ok, let's say Toulouse finish 4th then, my point still stands.