Quote Sadfish="Sadfish"I just don't see the point, I mean, there aren't enough clubs anyway for us to be turning away clubs with nowhere else to go.
Seems crazy to me, it does however make you see that these areas of the game are like the wild west with little direction.'"
sorry, but that's a really lazy throw away statement - and I've seen RL journalists make similar comments!
The sport is trying to do two things in my view:
1) raise standards
2) increase participation
If you are running a club in the amateur game you're aim (in my opinion) should fundamentally have to include increasing participation; the fact that the NCL, as our elite amateur competition, requires sides to run reserve teams and also have a junior section is a good thing.
Without this, anyone could take a bucket-full of cash, pay lads from other clubs to switch, and then be 'good enough' to play in our elite amateur competition. what does that do for the sport?
Bramley have been trapped by circumstance - folding as a pro-club, then trying to still run a pro-club model in an amateur competition but with amateur players. They got by on that basis when there was a winter NCL and they could utlise players from that competition to play summer games...but now the NCL has switched to summer they're stuck - they don't meet the criteria of the competition, and there has to be question marks about how they can even field a team (when they don;t have their own set-up or players committed to them alone!). They're the masters of their own operating model however and shouldn't be expecting that an exception be made for them! Maybe they thought they'd be able to pop back into the pro-ranks at some point, but given where they are they could have also looked to address what was necessary to meet the criteria as many other sides have done over many years!
as for no direction. there is direction which supports the growth of the game. there are inevitably things that individual clubs don't like etc. but there are 40+ clubs in the NCL, a host of others applying (and in doing so, striving to reach the standads required of the competition) and the suggestion seems to be that all that gets thrown out with the bath water because 'Bramley' (however historic the name!) have had a very very public moan!
It appears that the name of Bramley will disappear once again from the Rugby League map after a decision by the National Conference League to reject their application for entry into a league in which they’ve competed over the past season.
