Re: Thoughts on last night : Fri Apr 18, 2014 9:31 am  

Sad night.
The Stadium is falling apart, The Team has fallen apart, the once great Bradford Bulls are no more.
Fair play to the supporters who are still turning out to be fair.
Couldn't think of anything worse than watching my Rugby League up at Odsal but people still do.
I don't think I've ever been as bored at a RL game as I was last night, and we was winning?

Re: Thoughts on last night : Fri Apr 18, 2014 10:06 am  

Six years ago, anyone equipped with more than one brain cell could see that expanding SL to 14 teams would be a recipe for disaster. Where were the players of requisite quality to furnish all those teams? There weren't enough players for 12 teams and there's even less now.

The franchising and the accompanying 8-team play off system merely underlined the absurdity of it all as it ring-fenced the rewarding of mediocrity, rendered the regular season as meaningless and sentenced the competition into a period of spiralling decline.

I remain hopeful the new structure from next season will turn things around to some degree given time but that's by no means a given. Perhaps irreversible damage has already been done? I'd also have preferred a 10 team SL, the return of the Top 5 play off system and a bare minimum of 2 up, 2 down P&R.

I daresay the moron supporters of the rhinos who are seriously lacking in the IQ department will have enjoyed last night's 46-6 win played out primarily in 1st gear and occasional 2nd gear mode. Unfortunately, the dire playing standards required to win most SL games these days do the victors no favours in the long run either.

Re: Thoughts on last night : Fri Apr 18, 2014 10:39 am  

There are, in my view, two issues here. They're not entirely unrelated, but nor are they the same thing.

Firstly, I agree with Mr Eve's sentiments. I am fairly sure I said at the time that, as with P&R, more teams in SL should have been a long-term ambition, based on building enough infrastructure to actually sustain it. We don't currently have enough players and enough market revenue for it.

However, last night was, for me, more an indictment of issue 2: mis-management of Bradford Bulls. It is still perfectly possible to thrive in the world that issue 1 creates. Its worst feature is a tendency to perpetuate "haves and have-nots." Bradford had crowds and revenue streams to be a "have." Successive regimes of appalling mis-management have blown that.

The "airport derby" was more a product of proximity in league tables and cup finals than of geography. It was always going to fade in time. If that was anything like Bradford's biggest concern then things would seem much brighter.

The Hull derby was much better.

Re: Thoughts on last night : Fri Apr 18, 2014 10:59 am  

William Eve wrote:

Six years ago, anyone equipped with more than one brain cell could see that expanding SL to 14 teams would be a recipe for disaster. Where were the players of requisite quality to furnish all those teams? There weren't enough players for 12 teams and there's even less now.

The franchising and the accompanying 8-team play off system merely underlined the absurdity of it all as it ring-fenced the rewarding of mediocrity, rendered the regular season as meaningless and sentenced the competition into a period of spiralling decline.

I remain hopeful the new structure from next season will turn things around to some degree given time but that's by no means a given. Perhaps irreversible damage has already been done? I'd also have preferred a 10 team SL, the return of the Top 5 play off system and a bare minimum of 2 up, 2 down P&R.

I daresay the moron supporters of the rhinos who are seriously lacking in the IQ department will have enjoyed last night's 46-6 win played out primarily in 1st gear and occasional 2nd gear mode. Unfortunately, the dire playing standards required to win most SL games these days do the victors no favours in the long run either.

You've been posting those sentiments for the last 6 years. I think everyone agrees in general, they just don't rabbit on about it at every single opportunity.

But then I guess someone blessed with the requisite intelligence would move on rather than sounding like a broken record.

Re: Thoughts on last night : Fri Apr 18, 2014 11:26 am  

G1 wrote:

I wish I'd stayed home and watch the Hull derby.

This.

I got bored halfway through the second half... "oo look we've scored again".

Peacock rested, Bailey "rested", Ward injured within 30 seconds of coming on, Sinny benched and it still looked like a walk-over.

If Hardaker's kick hadn't had been so shoddy (either kick to ground or high, not straight at the defence at chest hight) it would have been a nilling.

We've played 9 games so far and there's only been 2 that have been exciting - the draw with Hudds and the loss to Saints... tell a lie - we were on a corporate for the Broncos game so that was fun, but that had little to do with the game.

Re: Thoughts on last night : Fri Apr 18, 2014 11:43 am  

I completely disagree with William.

If his problems about not having enough players to furnish teams is true, how do newly promoted teams stay up? Given the top clubs will be able to guarantee SL football, the newly promoted will always be searching for scraps from the top table, and be non-competitive.

All you get when you have P&R is the best young players grouped at the top few clubs, while academies of everyone else get strangled by the need to import as many experienced antipodeans as possible to give you a fighting chance of beating the drop next year.

That's why in football you see clubs yo-yoing between divisons for several seasons before become settled in one. The problem is that given SL's money is so much bigger than than of the national leagues, relegation will throw any club into financial turmoil, and you won't be able to be stable enough to get promoted and beat the established clubs. Result? An effective 8 team league while a handful of smaller clubs rotate through the bottom two places.

Liscencing is the way forward. Nigel Wood's argument in RLW for getting rid of it was that 'Halifax, Featherstone and Leigh could all have been like Widnes'.

Aside from the fact that, with P&R, Widnes wouldn't have been like Widnes - Betts sacked upon relegation, young players picked off by Wigan, Warrington etc - the fact that other clubs could be succesful isn't a reason for getting rid of liscencing. It's an argument for expanding the league and giving more teams a chance at the top table.

Eventually we will get to a system where all you have to do to get into SL is meet the liscencing criteria, and where the league can expand to meet the needs of developing clubs. The only question is how many cartridges we need to pump into our foot before we get there.

Re: Thoughts on last night : Fri Apr 18, 2014 11:56 am  

McDermott says Ward has strained some ankle ligaments and miss a few weeks.

Re: Thoughts on last night : Fri Apr 18, 2014 12:17 pm  

I thought Singleton and Kylie played well ,the pre-game rappers gave me an head ache and the fact they couldn't afford to plug in the electric scoreboard was one of many reasons we witnessed last night how far they have fallen.

Re: Thoughts on last night : Fri Apr 18, 2014 12:41 pm  

Can't disagree with any of the sentiments above. Last night was such a non-event it was tragic. Lazenby Cup matches have more intensity than that.

In the last three weeks we've played three derbies, none of which were even close to having a "derby" feel. The Challenge Cup game at Wakefield was a waste of time for all involved, the following week was no better and last night was just, well, sad. There I was, stood in front of a roped off patch of terracing and next to the Touchdown bar that had a huge hole in the wall, watching a contested training session amongst a crowd that was half the size that it used to be. The Leeds-Bradford derby may be more of a Sky TV creation that only really works when the two teams are relatively competitive but even when we were crap, the fixture still had a degree of anticipation about it.

And on the back of all this, we've got a huge step in intensity coming up against St Helens. It won't be easy to go all guns blazing after a three-week stroll.

Re: Thoughts on last night : Fri Apr 18, 2014 1:01 pm  

I'm a staunch bulls fan,but sadly I agree with everything that's been said on here at the moment