Rubbish. Like we know all this because Souths didn't meet the biased weighting of the sacred 'criteria'. A criteria which had superleague teams pumped up with Murdoch money.
I remember the idiot ceo from cronulla spruiking at the time that if cronulla merged with Souths the only identity Souths would have would be the colour of the socks.
Like Souths would merge with a superleague team?
I'd rather the club fold than follow that abortion of a merger. And many fans thought the same.
As for whittaker at the time....
NEIL WHITTAKER: Oh look, I think the door's been opened and then there've been opportunities for quite a while. I guess what the NRL is saying is that we'll continue to do whatever we can to assist them to do that. I mean that's what we've wanted all along. We've got six clubs involved in joint ventures, they've secured their future and it would be very good if we could ... if we could, you know, work with the Souths to achieve that for them as well.
Yep, out of those 6 clubs, 2 are recognisable, and 2 no longer exist. That really secured their future.
Souths stood alone because they weren't going to prostitute themselves just to make idiots like whittaker happy. They're the fans who piggins represented.
And once again if you think MORE rationalisation was the answer than you have no idea.
You sound like one of the pencil pushers from news Corp.
The criteria were biased in favour of the Roosters which is why they were never in jeopardy of merging and every other club was. That's why local juniors were only given a small section of the said criteria because it was to the benefit of one club the criteria also only counted crowds from 1996 when the Roosters drew 2 massive crowds on the back of a free McDonalds give away and the novelty of Monday night football also competition points were taken into account mysteriously when the Roosters started buying every player on the market. They were the problem, not the Super League clubs it was the Roosters.
I was never in favour of the criteria or rationalization because the entire criteria were unfair and unbalanced and all in favour of the Roosters. If the criteria looked at important things such as oversaturation and self-sustainability without one person owning them the Roosters would have rightfully come in last.
Again the Neil Whittaker quote comes in October 1999 after Souths were thrown out of the competition. I am talking about when the competitions came together in 1998 which I have explained on numerous occasions.
I am talking about a time when Souths could only draw 5,000 people to a game and George Piggins grand plan was to save your club was to build a 12,000 seat stadium in Redfern which speaks for itself.
Souths had little money because they were poorly run and had few fans turning up to watch matches.
Again like I have stated on numerous occasions ideally rationalization shouldn't have happened but clubs such as Souths were drawing smaller crowds than the Hunter Mariners which just wasn't sustainable they only drew crowds in 1999 because they were threatened with expulsion.
Suddenly crowds doubled from 6,000 to 12,000 because of that threat they weren't the only club like that Penrith were the same and on the flipside, the Bears were f**ked over by the appalling weather in 1998 which delayed the building of Graham Park by 12 months which left them homeless.
No, I am not a news limited pencil pusher I am just capable of critical thinking. If you look back at the actual criteria you would understand which club it favoured it wasn't the Super League clubs it was Eastern Suburbs who were under no threat of merging at any point which made no sense at the time.
Your quote about Cronulla's chairmen saying that was purely the reason rationalization never worked. Clubs were either way too selfish demanding a take over like Cronulla and Parramatta were or they refused to fight it as Souths did which led to a wishy-washy scenario where neither results were satisfying or helped the game in any way. Illawarra allowed themselves to be taken over by St George.
My argument is that a rationalization process which involved every club rather than protecting just one was a better scenario than the one in which the Bears died. The likes of Balmain and Wests were struggling to survive and every club held discussions over the viability of merging at some point so despite you saying Piggins fought for the fans even he would have maybe accepted terms at the beginning of the rationalization process before he became aware of other clubs selfishness.
The NRL should have been in charge of making joint-ventures of the clubs which would have kept them as joint-ventures rather than takeovers.
Or ideally not have any sort of rationalization process, to begin with. My argument was that if you are going to merge teams together it would be better if you did it with logic then just throwing things together and hoping for the best which is what happened.
