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Thread: Mike Critchley’s Super League revamp

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    Default Mike Critchley’s Super League revamp

    https://www.sthelensstar.co.uk/sport...e-competition/

    I like Mike a lot anyway and his articles and Saints knowledge is second to none and I really enjoyed this article, too. There’s a lot in there that I like and agree with and would like to see implemented into the sport.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dos Cervezas View Post
    https://www.sthelensstar.co.uk/sport...e-competition/

    I like Mike a lot anyway and his articles and Saints knowledge is second to none and I really enjoyed this article, too. There’s a lot in there that I like and agree with and would like to see implemented into the sport.
    Whilst I am in favour of 2x10 team leagues, it still fails to deal with the crux of the problem in that model - less games + higher salary cap = greater financial jeopardy. Given we don’t have 10 clubs who aren’t financially challenged now, reducing their games played, and in the cases of Salford and Wakefield, risking them not all playing against the clubs like Saints and Leeds with large numbers of followers with just push them into greater jeopardy.

    Squads are already too small, clubs aren’t or can’t spend more than the current cap, and there are too many games played for player welfare. Until we can solve that paradox, we cannot proceed with a new model. The worst possible outcome for the sport would be to tinker again and then undo it 10 years later (like Licensing)

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    Quote Originally Posted by magic superbeetle View Post
    Whilst I am in favour of 2x10 team leagues, it still fails to deal with the crux of the problem in that model - less games + higher salary cap = greater financial jeopardy. Given we don’t have 10 clubs who aren’t financially challenged now, reducing their games played, and in the cases of Salford and Wakefield, risking them not all playing against the clubs like Saints and Leeds with large numbers of followers with just push them into greater jeopardy.

    Squads are already too small, clubs aren’t or can’t spend more than the current cap, and there are too many games played for player welfare. Until we can solve that paradox, we cannot proceed with a new model. The worst possible outcome for the sport would be to tinker again and then undo it 10 years later (like Licensing)
    I don’t think we should touch two tens, for a start the minimum standards at the bottom of the twenty would be pitiful. There’s a lot of decent clubs in the Championship and big names but they’ll be way off where the top twenty sides in Rugby League should be. Clubs like Batley and other part-time teams are well run and do fantastically for their stature but we can’t be elevating clubs like that to an elite level when plenty won’t be full-time or be close to where we need them to be on or off the pitch. Also, the thought of playing the same nine sides three times a year in the league plus the cup and/or play-offs is an absolute no go, for me. Clubs will never drop to eighteen or nineteen games a year and I can’t imagine Sky would be too pleased with that either.

    I can’t see any reason to jump to fourteen either. The only argument I ever seem to see to support it is that it serves to get rid of loop games and I don’t think a fourteen team competition actually does anything for an already watered down and uninspiring competition but to water it down and bring down the overall standards further.

    Ultimately, I think we need licencing or some stricter form of the abomination it previously was.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Tabby View Post
    So let those clubs go bust, other better ran clubs will replace them and pick their better players up, or it will at least allow others to have a crack at SL. I'm sick of people making excuses for clubs like that who offer nothing.
    But where are these better run better financed clubs?

    I would love nothing more for a plan where the Salary Cap is doubled over the space of say 5 years, with say a cap of £1m for a mandatory reserve team. But even Saints / Wigan / Leeds would need that to be financed from somewhere. Either we play more games (which reducing the league doesn’t achieve, unless we play multiple loop fixtures which everyone’s against), we ask the club Chairmen to put their hands in their pockets (which is easy when it’s not your pockets), we dramatically increase our prices much like football (which everyone is against because £25 a ticket is an outrage) or the money needs to come from a magic tree.

    Ultimately the game is now suffering from years of mismanagement and any sort of plan for growth and investment. That’s at all levels, club, RFL and international alike.

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    This may come out as misjointed rambling but bear with me,

    RL is constantly looking to juggle with the format, a few seasons back we had the Super8s some fans complained that it was too complicated but the purpose of it was to make every game matter. If you finished 8th at the split you were still in with chance of being champions or if you were in the bottom 4 there was a chance of relegation.
    Some of the arguements against this was because the place of teams was in jeapordy until the last few weeks the clubs couldn't sell their tickets and hospitality packages until the end of the season. This damaged cash flow and I think Leeds in particular moaned about it.
    Personally I liked the structure but it doesn't reward consistency if team 8 can be champs. At the moment team finishing 6th can be champs so not much better.

    To really reward consistency we would need to go back to a first past the post system, the team that finishes top would be champions, great if your team are one of the top two or three contenders but for the rest the season is over after about ten weeks.
    So the arguement against that is that fans wont turn out in numbers to watch say Wakefield v Salford because there is nothing at stake but if we acccept that as an arguement are we saying that the product on the pitch isn't good enough or entertaining enough to bring the crowds in?

    So basically, to improve the game, do we change League structure again or look at ways of changing the game itself.

    If we go for the latter there's loads of ways we can dabble with rules and no one system would suit every fan and of course any rule change would have to suit out Antipodean friends buy it's food for thought.

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    A reasonable enough article from Mike. I do agree with a lot of what he says. I would however disagree with losing the Superleague brand. It is one of the few intellectual properties we as a sport have. To replace it with something that has the word Premier in it, is even more generic.

    I dont feel like a rebranding exercise will do it for us. We have our name let's stick at it for now.

    Regarding making Superleague an elite competition, I couldn't agree more. A quality, elite competition always has to be the goal. However, not wishing to to upset anyones political ideals by labelling RL as "Liberal" but it feels like the best word I can come up with. It feels like any system that closes the door on any village team competing at the top is immediately shelved. The smallest complaints from any corner of our sport seems to result in flip flopping. Framing the Future is one of many examples of this.

    The cold hard truth is you can't have everyone in an elite competition, that is the point of it being elite. I have nothing against Fev, Leigh or any other small town team but they are in no way elite. Having to make plans that accommodate them will always prevent us from having an elite competition.
    I could agree with you but then we would both be wrong.

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    The issue with "Superleague" is that so many sports are using that phrase that so many it won't be obvious what the sport actually is.

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    I don’t really get the need to change the name, especially to Rugby League Premiership as Mike suggests, another name with a load of connotations in other sports. I don’t think the name is even anywhere close to the top of the list for reasons why we are where we are as a sport.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dos Cervezas View Post
    I don’t really get the need to change the name, especially to Rugby League Premiership as Mike suggests, another name with a load of connotations in other sports. I don’t think the name is even anywhere close to the top of the list for reasons why we are where we are as a sport.
    For the reason I stated above. Plus it also enables the other code to claim the word "Rugby" for themselves.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Div View Post
    For the reason I stated above. Plus it also enables the other code to claim the word "Rugby" for themselves.
    Yet there’s a Rugby Premiership (as it’s known as on TV) and connotations with the Premier League, which was originally called Premiership. I just don’t see why we’d make such wholesale changes to the name of the competition, which will cost a fair chunk, to something that’s got very similar connotations to the name we’d be changing from when there’s far greater and more necessary changes required than the name.
    Last edited by Dos Cervezas; 4th May 2022 at 20:00.
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    There’s a programme on BBC tonight called the Rise and Fall of SuperLeague. I did a double take before realising it refers to the proposed football breakaway league but it is pertinent to the topic of naming.

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    If we change from twelve clubs playing twenty-seven tepid regular season rounds to having two fewer or more teams in Super League playing twenty-seven tepid regular season rounds we’ve simply failed and we’re doing the same thing we’ve done for nearly thirty years and we’re expecting different answers.

    I don’t see how the league growing or shrinking by two clubs is going to bring in any more money to the game, going to put bums on seats at stadiums or create a bigger/new TV audience. You only get that by doing something different and offering exactly the same with a slight cosmetic change is so very Rugby League and I’m fully expecting just that to happen.

    Other sports have different formats and/or multiple competitions on offer, we’ve got two poorly executed competitions and that doesn’t show signs of dissipating. We’ve got to look at doing something different, be it creating a competition, a different format like Nines or another new concept for the sport. It almost certainly won’t be aimed at anyone here whose spent their free time signing up to an internet message board to talk about rugby league but that’s absolutely fine, we’ll be the ones who are at games in February when it’s freezing.
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    So I have thought about it and the conclusion I have come to is if we’re moving to 2 leagues of 10, we will have to introduce a new competition to balance the fixtures. Now immediately people will point to the Challenge Cup/ FA Cup and say “but cup competition is waning”, but I think we would need to be more creative, and look at the 2020 model in cricket.

    The lazy answer would be a 7s or a 9s series where we round robin in groups of 4, then some finals structure, which outputs an additional 6-8 games into the calendar for the teams. Instead I would much prefer us to look at adding more rules to create interest. Something like limiting the number of times a player can play in the competition (say 4 times) mean you see more teams like ours against Castleford, which most on here thought was far more interesting than a regular game. You could also “win” the round robin by scoring the most points rather than winning the most games, removing the current emphasis in the sport on defence. There’s a few things, it would need to be thought through.

    Then you would have;

    23 games from the league
    0-3 games for the Playoffs
    1-4 games for the Challenge Cup
    6-8 games for the new competition (with a limit per player of 4)
    0-1 game for the World Club Challenge

    This means that the players will play the same number of maximum games as now, the clubs gain an extra two fixtures, and the fans get to see some more interesting games, with emphasis on attacking rugby and using deep squads. Of course upping the cap to support deeper squads need to be part of that, but that’s a separate conversation.

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    Quote Originally Posted by magic superbeetle View Post
    So I have thought about it and the conclusion I have come to is if we’re moving to 2 leagues of 10, we will have to introduce a new competition to balance the fixtures. Now immediately people will point to the Challenge Cup/ FA Cup and say “but cup competition is waning”, but I think we would need to be more creative, and look at the 2020 model in cricket.

    The lazy answer would be a 7s or a 9s series where we round robin in groups of 4, then some finals structure, which outputs an additional 6-8 games into the calendar for the teams. Instead I would much prefer us to look at adding more rules to create interest. Something like limiting the number of times a player can play in the competition (say 4 times) mean you see more teams like ours against Castleford, which most on here thought was far more interesting than a regular game. You could also “win” the round robin by scoring the most points rather than winning the most games, removing the current emphasis in the sport on defence. There’s a few things, it would need to be thought through.

    Then you would have;

    23 games from the league
    0-3 games for the Playoffs
    1-4 games for the Challenge Cup
    6-8 games for the new competition (with a limit per player of 4)
    0-1 game for the World Club Challenge

    This means that the players will play the same number of maximum games as now, the clubs gain an extra two fixtures, and the fans get to see some more interesting games, with emphasis on attacking rugby and using deep squads. Of course upping the cap to support deeper squads need to be part of that, but that’s a separate conversation.
    As far as restructures go I think this suggestion has merit.
    However, I don't like the limit on how many times a player can play. That would just have the effect of artificially affecting the results and the table.

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    I think the sport is crying out for a period of stability. Part of our sport's problems derive from constantly flecking about with its structure.

    It's become like an ingrained obsession, always searching for some magic formula that really doesn't exist.

    We had a chance in the first decade of SL to build on a wave of optimism and growing interest in the sport. And the sport's top brass bolloxed it up.

    Not least by damaging the entertainment spectacle by switching to allow teams to slow down play.

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    I have posted this before but I feel like we need a league Cup competition similar to how they have done the womens challenge cup to replace loop fixtures.

    A shorter more intense League season will bring meaning back to league fixtures.

    If we have 10 teams that means an 18 week season. If we stick with 12 or have bye weeks then 22.
    I could agree with you but then we would both be wrong.

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    A second competition would need to to last between 5 to 9 weeks and could be played February to April.
    I could agree with you but then we would both be wrong.

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