LER news : Fri Oct 05, 2012 8:49 am
Montpellier have withdrawn from the Championnat. The 88-0 drubbing at Carcassonne last week seems to have been the straw that broke the camel's back. It just hasn't worked for them.So it's back to a nine-team league. How they deal with it is another matter. The usual thing is to expunge their record, so it's as if they were never there, but we've already had a Magic weekend - an extra set of fixtures. To restore equanimity to the calendar, that whole weekend will have to be scrubbed out and the second Magic weekend at the end of the season is a non-starter.
While it's clearly a blow to the league and to the game in France, I don't see it as a sign of a wider malaise, incidentally.