Sorry,should read 21 clubs, .... Some of Newcastle 's players may have benefitted from the situation but that a long way from vthe treachery and deceit that went on at the Broncos and the Raiders
I'm sorry and I mean no offence but you are simply misinformed...
The Newcastle knights (along with the Raiders and most importantly the Broncos) were one of the three initial conspirators that looked into the potential of creating a new professional league, the only reason that they didn't sign with SL in the end is cause of a stuff up in Brisbane that lead to Ribot having to stay an extra day in Brisbane to sign the Broncos instead of heading straight down to sign the Knights after signing the Broncos,which left an opening for the ARL to jump in and sign the Knights players before SL could get to them.
My apologies , 20 clubs not 24
Unlike you though, i am not naive enough to think that the ills of the Super League War fell solely at the feat of the ARL.
While some Newcastle players may have benefitted from the situation. They certainly didn’t scheme and plot to bring down the game like Brisbane and your club did.. Though if you want to go on believe ing in News Limited, Paul Knunts and the tooth fairies version of history ....good luck
Did you actually read the conversation you are commenting on, or are you just flying off the handle half-cocked?
I can't be bothered typing the exact same points out
again so I'll just quote myself from before-
Nobody is saying that the Broncos or News were innocent or whatever it is that you think that is being said, I'm just saying that SL didn't occur in a vacuum, it was a reaction to some terrible decisions the NSWRL/ARL made, and some incredibly shitty (borderline corrupt in some cases) things that the NSWRL/ARL did, and to forget/ignore those things is a bloody stupid thing to do that a lot of people seem intent to want to do, and is literally the definition of whitewashing history BTW...
Look at it this way, if the ARL didn't bankrupt the Raiders overnight because of a misunderstanding of the new salary cap rules (that a good portion of the comp also misunderstood mind you) do you think the Raiders would have found it necessary to go after the SL money?
If they didn't saddle the Western Reds with a bunch of other teams travel expenses among other things that literally doomed them to failure before they'd even started do you think that they would have jumped ship?
If they just let the Broncos sell their exclusive merch at game days and in Queensland, hold their matches in the off season against English clubs, and actually considered their plans to hold some big events in Brisbane, etc, etc, without either just dismissing them outright without even considering their ideas/plans at all (normally screaming tradition at them as they slammed the door in their face) or demanding that they take something ridiculous like 95% of the profit from the merch for themselves and to split among the other clubs, and then threatening to kick them out of the comp each time, do you think they would have felt threatened enough that they thought it necessary to even entertain the idea of creating another comp for them to fall back to?
Hell If they weren't looking at a scorched earth approach to rationalisation do you reckon the Sharks would have jumped ship to SL?
The answer in each case is who knows, but under those circumstances suddenly it seems a shit ton less likely that any of them feel that it's necessary to jump ship, and any SL would definitely have had a hell of a lot harder time convincing effectively half the comp to abandon the ARL to start a new comp no matter how much money they were throwing around, cause why risk a good thing on a hope and a prayer if you don't have too...
Almost all of the SL clubs went to SL out of necessity for their survival and/or cause they felt underappreciated/used and abused by the NSWRL/ARL, to deny that or play that fact down is to deny history.
By the way the only one who seems to be a blind follower of anyone is you! Your view has zero nuance whatsoever and can be surmounted to simply ARL good - News/SL bad, so frankly I think you have a bad case of projection.
Long story short, but for your information I didn't support SL at the time (I didn't like the idea of a broadcasting company running the game with their interests coming first) and at the time of SL I pretty much returned to being a Bears fan (I was a Bears fan before the Raiders even existed and though for obvious reason it's more complicated now they were still my 'second team').
So yeah I'm definitely not a News fan boy (if that is even a thing), however I'm also not stupid enough to pretend that SL came out of nowhere for no reason, SL was a response to terrible mismanagement and at times borderline corruption within the NSWRL/ARL, to pretend otherwise is not only stupid but is to fail to learn from history to an egregious degree.
Arko and Quayle Were ex footballers and acted as such. - They wernt a bunch of businessmen with only there own self interests at heart not like scummy media billionaires
They were also power hungry egomaniacs with a tendency to treat people and clubs differently depending on who they were and whether or not they were run by their mates or not...
$1m was alot of money at the time. The ARL had built up a sizeable war chest and that was only $20m.
AND THERE WERE NO OTHER BIDDERS!
# Packer Took up his PTV option 12 months before News Limited showed any interest .
There were no other bidders because the ARL and Packer quietly bundled the PTV rights in with the FTA rights, in other words there were no other bidders cause the other people that may have been interested in bidding didn't realise that the PTV rights were up for sale and as such weren't offered the opportunity to place a bid.
Look I mean absolutely no offence, but you really don't know a great deal about SL, but if you are interested in learning about the SL war then there is a book called Super League: The Inside Story by Mike Colman, it's really the only info on the SL war from the time that is reliable and it's a pretty good book, unfortunately it was published in late 96 so it only addresses half the war (but frankly it's the more important bit, especially to this discussion), but it's the best (and pretty much the only) book on the subject, so yeah if you can get your hands on it you should pick it up and give it a read because I think you'd find it rather enlightening.
