No what I am saying is the RFL need to take off the rose tinted glasses and stop all the positive ' bull ' they keep coming out with and get down to some serious hard work or they will have a shrinking sub SL sport

I wish i did, believe me. Like i said it's blooming hard work.







Most grants are for specific project and not for running the team, a grant might allow you to introduce kids to the sport, and over time develop players for futre generations but not for signing and funding a team of pro players.







As I said before, to get the right people you have to a) develop them, or b) pay for them, and to pay for them that is out of hte reaches of most clubs.



We as a sport need to develop people to run the game, run the clubs as well as play the game, for the future of the game. otherwise we're screwed. and that has to come from the top downwards.

I'd just like to take this opportunity to mention



BRAMLEY



Because we dont hear much about



[size=200BRAMLEY [/size

Great gesture by Sheffield! Well done. Is there an appeal other fans can contribute to? When York were looking down and out a few years ago RL fans from all over had collections for us which has never been forgotten. I for one would like to make some small contirbution.

Just so long as we get our £3m from the RFL first, Doncaster can wait their turn. All these flatcappers keep saying we're getting £3m from the RFL, so it must be true.

You are the stereotypical muppet flatcapper and I claim my £5!







Translation: "Why can't it be like the good old days when we only had to play the teams next door"?

Find it Strange that our club could cease to exist because it owes debts that an average football league player earns in a week.

£80k does seem a small ammount to put a club into administration, unless the main issue is cashflow i.e. the club simply can't pay its staff, players etc and thus can't continue operating?

ya miserable get!

Thanks. this isn't the place mind.

That does sound like something the clubs should do for themselves. If they don't then it ends up with all the clubs effectively being run by the RFL, b ut with a bit of leeway on some decisions.

RL was born from clubs looking to be profit making and moving away from centralised control of the RFU, you are now suggesting they should relinquish their rights/responsibilities and let the RFL take charge of them.

.



That might have been true at one time but there are very few clubs if any making a profit in todays climate.

Was it?

Do the RFL actually possess that expertise though? The RFL it seems to me is an administrative body with precious little experience of turning a Pound in a fiercely competitive environment.







I think you've just summed up the RFL's expansion strategy in its entirety!









Collaboration my friend, it's the future! It should be entirely feasible for the clubs, which after all are very well aware of the real problems they face, to work together in order to solve them.



A forum for knowledge exchange would cost nothing and yet immediately allow benchmarking of all the various activities clubs perform. Identifying the "best in class" and allowing every club to understand how to perform better and at lower cost.



Geographically adjacent clubs may consider pooling resources, external contracts could be negotiated by the league as opposed to individually by each club. That could result in lower unit prices and far fewer resources (and hence overall cost) involved in the negotiation itself.



What this requires is for the clubs to understand that in helping to make other clubs stronger they are in fact improving the health of the game and utimately the health of every club in it.

What so you'd rather Doncaster live in a fantasy world where they go into administration every other year chasing Super League in the Championship than be a viable Championship 1 side?

The people running the club in the past may well have lived in a fantasy world but it's the true loyal fans who end up feeling the pain when the club goes belly-up.

It was a major part of it, rugby was very popular in the north, generating big gate receipts for the top clubs. Broken time payments meant better players, better teams and ultimately bigger gate receipts. Of course some people prefer less prosaic, more mythical explanations.

For example?

I've seen at least one version that leads heavily with a crude kind of class war narrative (northern industrial proletariat vs southern bourgeoisie), now there were clear class based elements to it (I don’t think anybody doubts that), but they shouldn’t be overplayed in relation to the underlying commercial interests of the clubs who broke away.

I thought their motivation was the desire to offer fair compensation to their players for the time off work that was required by playing in Saturday matches.

The breakaway was caused by the northern clubs desire to pay players which was outlawed at the time in Rugby Union.

Not sure profits were at the forefront of their minds.

True but I got called negative for saying Doncaster should have to focus on Championship 1 (actually somewhat stronger words than that) but if Doncaster want stability it will be in Championship 1 and I'm sure people would prefer a stable club midtable in Championship 1 than a yo-yo club with financial problems (which of course gets to the question of why if P & R is so damaging it is retained at that end of the Championship

I agree with your understanding of what broken time payments were for, but you need to ask why a club itself would want to pay broken time money in order to get certain players to play for them? Paying broken time payments was a not an act of charity, it was a commercial decision for the benefit of the clubs who paid them.

nice try, but old bait

Apparently in Yorkshire the County RFU turned a blind eye to broken time payments and allowed the Yorkshire Senior League (yes there were RU leagues then) a say in running itself. However, the 12 clubs in it turned it into a closed shop and when in the 1894-95 season the clubs re-elected Wakefield Trinity and Hull over second tier champions Morley and runners-up Castleford yet again excluding the second tier clubs the RFU wanted to take the league over themselves and thus 11 of the 12 clubs (with the exception of Dewsbury) decided to plan to break away.



In Lancashire the (3 tier) league was run directly by the County RFU with test matches for promotion and relegation (bottom to play top and 2nd bottom to play 2nd) and thus this issue didn't arise. However, they were stricter on broken time payments and after Salford, Wigan and Leigh got expelled from the league for broken time payments 9 clubs decided to join the Yorkshire clubs in breaking away (ironically Salford weren't one of them) and the two Cheshire clubs of Runcorn and Stockport switched as well, possibly to play at a higher standard than they could in Cheshire but not certain.



Initially there were no plans to have lower divisions as it was assumed eventually the NRU would rejoin the RFU, although some expansion to allow separate Lancashire and Yorkshire leagues did occur in 1896. However, second level clubs, especially in Lancashire, who relied on big matches against the clubs that had broken away started to switch even though it initially meant just friendlies and Challenge Cup. While it took longer for Yorkshire clubs to switch en masse due to them not having been treated well by bigger clubs, the Lancashire clubs largely switched in 1897 and professional second and third competitions were formed (although the third one only lasted a season), and the RU leagues were scrapped. In 1898 a professional Yorkshire Second Competition was formed but this was as a continued RU league in Yorkshire (no idea when it eventually was scrapped).



There's a lot more information than this about the time though in Mike Latham's book The Rugby League Myth: Forgotten clubs of Lancashire, Cheshire and Furness

True , bad manners on my part





Serious issues being discussed , apologies