In terms of competitiveness this makes good sense. However, the reserves teams are basically only supported by friends and family of the players, getting in for a fiver or less.

League 1 teams aren't well supported to begin with but taking some gates against League 1 teams and swapping them for gates against SL reserves teams will still be a fair financial hit on match day and would also presumably make them less attractive to sponsors and investors.

Longer term I think we'll see a few of the top teams join the championship and the remainders go amateur or fold. There's no difference in quality between the NCL Premier and League 1 so I don't see how it's anything but an unnecessary cost for Rochdale Hornets, North Wales etc to play in League 1 and meet the financial requirements that go along with it.

If fixtures were arranged so the super League reserve team played at home when the first team were away , it could potentially boost interest and revenue, but would depend on where the games were to be hosted I guess as might be difficult for hull FC reserves say to be able to play at the MKM

If you're hardcore enough to be interested in watching reserves regularly without knowing one of the players then you'll be on the coach to the first team's away game. Have a look on social media at some reserves games. It's not unusual for not a single fan to comment on a result when it's published. The only real interest is if you know someone involved or for the purposes of debating whether X player should be called up to the first team.

It would be brilliant in terms of competitiveness but I think we'd quickly see Rochdale Hornets and North Wales Crusaders become the next dominoes to fall if they had to take a hit like that.

Is it 34 clubs left now? And we can be utterly certain some more of those are on the brink of existence. We won't do anything visionary and surprising like a 16 team super league and 18 team championship. Instead the RFL will badly apply a sticking plaster. That will give them some time to polish up their hand-wringing press release template.

Apparently, the championship clubs voted against a conference style structure that would have essentially seen the championship and L1 merge into one comp. With only 8 teams left in L1, it seems it's the only logical solution at this point without a big injection of capital into the game.

Youth teams have led to some poor crowds in Football's Papa Johns Trophy but the Premier League clubs think its worthwhile and asking for more teams or more games.

Of course the Championship and League1 already have a lot of SL reserves on dual ref anyway though

Hunslet have issued a statement in support of a combined Ch/Lg1 with a conference structure. Quite cutting in relation to Ch clubs that have rejected the idea. Hope the link works. https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_ ... 2759375015

Hunslet have issued a statement in support of a combined Ch/Lg1 with a conference structure. Quite cutting in relation to Ch clubs that have rejected the idea. Hope the link works. https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_ ... 2759375015

Decent idea. So I doubt they will think of it!