There might be a better way , so away you go , explain this better way ?

So once again , explain your subjective totally fair system ? , for it to be fair where does any club have to finish within the league structure ?

No, Crusaders were a disaster waiting to happen from a number of standpoints and could only have "worked" if Samuel had been much richer and much more honest. It was a known that he was neither.







The difference is that Widnes lost a dodgy backer, had a difficult period and then get a white knight. Most SL clubs would always be rescued by somebody. Crusaders were always Samuel's personal toy and when he lost interest nobody else rich cared enough.



Cru probably didn't need to be self-sustaining but they should have been closer to it than they were.







This is BS. It is not a question of being wise after the event, it was completely predictable that he would act as he did. He had done so before.



Crusaders probably would be a "strong" team today if Samuel had been willing and able to lose a couple of million a year, but he wasn't and so this meaningless.

The point of the salary cap is to prevent clubs bankrupting themselves. Expansion clubs typically have smaller incomes than trad clubs. How does it make sense to take away the financial protection from those sides who need it most?

Where have I suggested anything to the contrary? My point was that none of the issues raised in the OP had anything to do with the failure of Crusaders, and you appear to have agreed with this 100%. It was not 'completely predictable' that Samuel would walk away, I can't recall a single person raising that issue at the time and unless you are claiming that you have the ability to see into the future then there's absolutely no way you can suggest that you knew Samuel would pull out for certain. If it was 'completely predictable' from the start, then the RFL clearly would not have allowed Crusaders into Super League. Suggesting that they should have been 'more self-sustaining' is just ridiculous, it wouldn't have made any difference as your post implies. Virtually all clubs rely on backers, and virtually all clubs would go the way of the Crusaders if their backers pulled out.



FWIW, Crusaders were rescued, you must have missed the two seasons they spent in Wrexham? Unfortunaltely for them, the new owners were just as bad as Samuel. But again, at the time there was no way of knowing that.

To the RL fans who've signed up and started posting about things like licensing criteria and fan demographics etc, that's probably one of the best ways to alienate new people from the sport. It's a football message board, let them develop an interest and get into RL at their own pace.

So you are expecting in 15 months Northampton to rock up with 25 C1 quality players from around the Northampton area? You are expecting Northampton to operate under circumstances and limitations you expect of nobody else?



Just another example of your "im no against expansion as long as they arent allowed to actually compete with my club" standpoint.

Is this the part where you have lost the argument so you pretend to be confused until you can change it? Or do you really not understand why we would use the word [i[uif[/u[/i?

The fact you specifically mentioned SL players is the reason I thought we were discussing SL players.

well i would look at the clubs in C1 and the championship and look at what proportion of their squad was made up of players from the heartlands but not from their academies. For instance, if we look at Leigh from last season they had 11 players who had come through local SL clubs academies, or 44% of their playing squad. The Championship Salary cap is £300k, So we know that Leigh (if, for ease, we use them as the average) spend roughly £132k or an average of £12k on these players. If Northampton were to have an equal chance of competing for these players, they would (IMO) need to be paying them at least £18k, for them to even think about leaving their home towns and dragging their families across country. This would mean that as an allowance for distance, Northampton would receive a £66k or 22% increase in Salary Cap at Championship level. If they were to do this, it would still mean however, that they needed to find 14, part-time local based players to fill out a 25 man squad, which would clearly be an outstanding acheivement for an expansion side in their first few years of existance.anywhere.

No I said " the best young talent " , never mentioned SL players

Sorry , I forgot about the ' If ' word , so that just falls into the same catagory as ' if ' your auntie had a dick , they'd be your uncle , but they dont , so they aren't



So you want something that doesn't exist , fantastic argument

no, you said Are you now trying to argue that the best young talent picked up by SL clubs, who play for SL clubs arent Sl players?

No, if you read back, you will understand. Well i hope you would, but considering the level of deliberate stupidity you have shown before i dont hold out much hope.

Only the ones who go on to play for SL clubs on a regular basis , the others that dont aren't SL players , thats why they end up back in the Championships



What % of juniors that play Scholarship and academy at SL clubs go on to have genuine SL careers ? , it isn't the fault of Championship clubs that SL clubs cannot make the best juniors into SL players , the Championship clubs have to make do with 3/4/5 th best to produce their players without the ' facilities '

that SL clubs have available , like grass , balls and cones

So you in all your wisdom doesn't know a better way , but you want the encumbants at Red Hall to find one for you , sorry you've lost the argument

Your deliberate confusion is boring. You see had you actually read the conversation between myself and rupert bear instead of jumping in with both feet, trying to score points, you wouldnt look like such a silly old man.



Lets take it in baby steps for you



Lets put an end to it before your deliberate confusion to hide your idiocy derails another thread.



I didnt suggest there was a better way, didnt suggest i knew of a better way, didnt suggest i expected red hall to go and find a better way, simply refuted a direct statement saying I would only be in favour of SC changes which benefited expansion sides by saying i would also be in favour of changes which which made the SC work better for heartland sides.

and that's the end of that one..

And who do they, by and large, go on to play for in the championships? Is it the local heartland clubs by any chance? That doesnt sound like a bad thing for the local championship clubs, it seems like an advantage for them



except they dont, a huge amount of players in the championships are players that have come from SL academies, that is the advantage a club like Leigh gets, a decent youngster gets picked up by a local SL club, goes through an SL academy, with SL coaches, SL nutrionists and SL sports scientists playing at a higher level, with and against better players, and as such, even those who come back down to championship level are better players than they would otherwise would be, and clubs Leigh are at an advantage when looking to sign them for no other reason than their location.

we can but hope.

No, I don't. THe Crusaders suffered form all those issues. They could have been "saved" if their backer had been who he was argued to be but he wasn't.







You must have been avoiding forums for the last four years then because I certainly did say that and I was far from the only person. Even people with no interest in RL e.g. ex-Warriors fans were saying that. The mailbags of all the trade papers and mags were full of people saying this. How you could not have noticed I don't know.







Not at all. The RFL chose to be bloody stupid. Very many fans chose to blindly follow the RFL but many others could see exactly where it would end up.







My post does not imply anything of the sort. It is common sense that a club that requires £2 million a year injected into it is less sustainable than one that requires £500k. Both would be screwed without backers but one will find it easier to find a backer. Anyone with half a brain can see this.







There was, any Wrexham FC fan would have told you the same (and they did make this point on Totalrl.com at the time).



Wrexham Crusaders had little in common with Celtic Crusaders. Moss merely bought the SL licence that Samuel had been given by the RFL for free. Crusaders had no assetts.

If they dont have it, they don't spend it. It really is as simple as that. I havent once suggested they should be forced to spend the money, or that they should spend it if they dont have it. Simply that if it is available, they are allowed to spend it.

If they don't have it, they will spend it anyway. That's the lesson of rugby league management since the 1960s and why the salary cap was brought in for the lower leagues. Crusaders are a perfect example of why this rule needs to be enforced for expansion clubs as well as heartlands ones; nobody forced them to spend more than they could afford but they did so anyway.



The cap should be a percentage of revenue or even take into account available funds from outside but it should still exist otherwise we'll go to the era of clubs spending 95% of revenue on player wages and selling their grounds to make up their losses.

But it is not simple, most businesses base and governments base their growth and often existence and governance on money they do not currently have. Capital debt markets would cease to exist if this were not true.



If they do not have the money available how can they spend it?

yet Crusaders, like Wakefield, like Widnes and countless others before them went bust whilst operating under a salary cap system. The SC has proven a very very poor tool for stopping clubs going bust, it hasnt, and wont, stop clubs spending more than they can afford. Regardless of having an SC or not we need to trust clubs, whether they be Leigh, Halifax, SWS, or Northampton to be run viably and sustainably. We shouldnt be letting Northampton in if we believe the people running the club wont run it sustainably, the SC isnt set at a level which means sustainability for Northampton, the SC is an absolutely arbitrary amount to Northampton, sticking to the current SC wont make them viable, giving them a £70k allowance over it wont stop them being viable.