Fev will go up with that side. McDermott is getting his own people in and shipping those off who he doesn’t like or rate. Chisholm’s out the door. Looks like he prefers the experience of Kheriallah over Pickersgill. Ford over Chisholm.

Big squad for a long season. Leigh have just signed another young NRL player in Kai O’Donnell. No one will compete with those two clubs.

But even with the squad we have we should be fighting for 3rd with York and Barrow/Widnes.

Barrow & Widnes won't be anywhere near 3rd come the end of the season. I would go as far to say that neither will make the playoffs.

If Fev don't go up, and in a one off game it's always 50/50 - they will surely be looking at a very large bill that will be hard to stomach.

I also have a sneaking feeling that the drawbridge to SL is about to be pulled up, perhaps the good folks at Featherstone also suspect that, and it really is now or until the next time the game is restructured.....

I hope Ford is on a contract until the end of the season - too old and too slow for SL next year, which is why he's signed for Featherstone. Nobody in SL wanted him for this year, and next year he'll be even older.

Featherstone can sign as many players as they like, but its all going to come down to a one-off game against Leigh.

If they have an off-day that day - which can easily happen to any team - they won't get the promotion slot.

Of course, the same applies to Leigh!

One of those two teams will be looking at staying in the Championship with a bloated over-priced squad that they cannot really afford. The promoted team will have to offload most of their players as well because there is no way either squad will survive at Super League level.

This is what happens when you have promotion and relegation between an elite professional league and a largely part-time league.

Im going to disagree with a lot of that. The worrying thing for the other teams in our league is that whichever team does not go up can almost certainly afford to run a similar standard of squad next year, Leigh because of Beaumont willing to pump money in to the club and Fev because they have income streams that far outweigh every team in this league and a few teams in SL. Regards to the squads when they go up, I think Fev have the best chance of staying up although at this point I feel they are a little behind Leigh in the race for that spot in SL but if they were to go up I think they will end up keeping the majority of their squad and with a few good editions should be able to keep their place the following year. If you want to compare then they are a little bit like Hull Kr when they were in our division and they built year on year to get to this point. Leigh on the other hand are likely to lose a lot of players, firstly because of the quota rules and secondly I would imagine because a lot of their players signed 1 year contracts which looks like a chance to put themselves in the shop window and with squad rotations like leigh have every year there will be very little loyalty and most of their players will be out for what they can get which is why I think Fev have the upper hand in that respect.

Well, Fev fans keep telling us a lot of their squad are part-time. I'm not so sure myself, but if they are right then those players are either going to have to go full-time or leave, since SL rules require a full-time squad. They've also got quite a few older players, although McDermott seems to be phasing them out.

So I think they would need a good bit of squad turnover. I agree that they have good income streams, so that's a positive.

As for Leigh, well, who can predict what Beaumont will do? He has previous with spitting his dummy.

You can actually check the Twitter bios of some of Fev's part-time players and they tell you their job (James Lockwood and John Davies are 2 examples). Fev have a mixture of players who have jobs outside rugby and players who don't, but none of them are in full-time training - they train (I think) 3 evenings per week and Brian McDermott made it clear in an interview this week that he wishes the club was full time.

Can you point me to the RFL rule that say SL rules require a full-time squad? They must have changed fairly recently, because in 2019 Davide Longo was suggesting the club would remain part-time, or at least remain a hybrid team, if promoted.

No I can’t, to be honest. Lots of people have said so on TRL, so I went with that.

Either way, it would be an absolute joke if SL allowed a part time team into the elite league. I doubt they’d allow it, so expect that rule to change if the need arises.

Besides, Featherstone would be guaranteed to finish bottom if they went into SL with a part time squad. It’s hard enough with a full time team, as Leigh will testify.

I think it depends on what you mean by a part-time squad. I'm certain that most of the players would be full time and I'd presume the training would be more reflective of that, but it's not implausible that a small number of players could be retained in the squad on a part-time basis. Anyone watching Fev would really struggle to name the part-time players in the 17 each week, in my opinion, if they didn't know who they were.

[quote="The Phantom Horseman"]I think it depends on what you mean by a part-time squad. I'm certain that most of the players would be full time and I'd presume the training would be more reflective of that, but it's not implausible that a small number of players could be retained in the squad on a part-time basis. Anyone watching Fev would really struggle to name the part-time players in the 17 each week, in my opinion, if they didn't know who they were.[/quote]

Where as we are quite the opposite. You would struggle to tell who the full time players are.
They are all that bad, full time or part time makes no difference!