keighley1 wrote:
It s true. Union cannot claim to be a national game in England with only one team north of Northampton and nothing on the Eastern side of the country north of Reading.
The same can be argued of football, half of the teams come from three cities. No team west of Reading and south of Birmingham. No team in the whole of the Yorkshire counties. The PL title only been won once by a team outside London or Manchester. Only one team East of Bedford. Now are we going to say football is not a national game? Of course not because sport is about more than the elite level competition. Same criteria can be applied to cricket.
Look below the elite competition. Best guide would be to go to any town in the England and see if the have at least one Football/RU/Cricket club that puts out more than one team.
RU is a mirror image of RL geographically. I can see Newcastle and Leeds going belly up if they don t get promotion pretty soon.
I suggest you take a closer look at the map. Broncos aside all English SL clubs are contained within 30 mile band latitude across England with no club South of Warrington and North of Leeds. Leicester is distinctly north of Northamption as is Salford. Arguably the only team situated along the M4 are Reading and Bath. The M4 Argument would be better applied to Welsh RU. Regarding Newcastle and Leeds as I understand it Leeds are more financially stable than when they were in the Premiership. Bristol were in worse shape than Newcastle financially when they got relegated and have recovered without too much fuss. It more comes down to having the right backers, compare Bradford with the likes of Widnes, Wakefield, Wasps, Bath.
If Wasps had been relegated I would have made them a far better candidate to go under.
