its been comfirmed that at least 1 current super league club will get canned and at least 1 championship club will be promoted..
http://www.sportinglife.com/rugbyle...STORY_NAME=rleague/10/08/04/RUGBYL_Super.html
bye bye either castleford,wakefield or salford...
for mine 2 of them should go and replaced by toulouse & barrow
Maybe all three clubs will go?
The article you quoted says that Barrow do not want to go up and will not be applying. I really cant see any justification as to how or why Salford could stay up (though i am open to be convinced). From what i can gather, even their own fans seem to prefer them to stay down, as they got better crowds (after taking away support into account) when they were in the lower league.
Castleford and Wakefield are a tough one. They do get decent crowds, but are just not quite up to where you would expect the miminimum criteria to be, although they are also not far off it either. It would seem a bold gamble to drop one or both, as it could potentially be a bad thing for the dropping club, nobody knows. The ideal situation is to combine the support from both clubs into one super club, but that is easier said than done.
London are another club, who must be perilously close to having trouble. I know why they are needed, but in all honesty, there crowds are simply nothing short of tragic. I think that the RFL probably needs to either drop them from the competition, or give them a 10 year licence and sink extra funds into the promotion of the club. They either are worth a lot of money to the league as a whole through tv contracts etc, or they arent worth anymore than any other club, in which case, i dont believe they are successful enough to command a position with the others, and in any case, a stint in the 2nd division might actually help them build core support, like it seems to have done for Widnes and previously seemed to do for Salford and Castleford.
The other two expansion clubs look safe to me. Catalans cant really have done any more, and Wrexham, although they seem to have wavered a little bit, were an absolute revelation earlie on in the year.
On the upside, Toulouse, really must come in, and i would be stunned if they are not offered a place, although I must say, they always should have been given a place. Widnes also do look to have done as well as is possible, off the field at least. I think that both of these sides must make it in.
Realistically, it means that Salford would miss out, with one of Castleford and Wakefield, but i am not too sure about this.
I really think that some of the traditional fans look at things the wrong way, The next division 2 league could potentially feature sides from Barrow, Leigh, Castleford, Featherstone, Salford, Wakefield, Halifax and possibly even FC Lezignan, Gateshead, Sheffield, South Wales etc. That could be a hugely successful and enjoyable competition between some excellent traditional clubs with some very good support. What could be better?
