Fonz wrote: Fri Mar 04, 2022 5:49 pm I was wondering recently, are there any places in England where a pro rugby team could be well supported but there just aren't any top flight clubs around at the moment?
For me, if someone is willing to lose enough money setting it up, a team would be viable at at least the Sale/Newcastle level in Yorkshire. Remain very unconvinced with the Cornish PiratesFonz wrote: Fri Mar 04, 2022 5:49 pmI was wondering recently, are there any places in England where a pro rugby team could be well supported but there just aren't any top flight clubs around at the moment?Paddington Bear wrote: Fri Mar 04, 2022 11:05 amYeah exactly my thoughts. The Hundred demonstrated this. England is too taken with local petty rivalries for this stuff to work - see places like West Brom insisting that they're not part of Birmingham, the nightmare of working out how to name the Leeds and Manchester Hundred teams etc.Kawazaki wrote: Fri Mar 04, 2022 10:56 am
I'm not so sure that's true. Northerners like being Northern and I'm fairly certain that people from the Southwest are similarly proud. Midlands and London/Southeast types are probably less emotionally attached to where they were born.
Four professional club sides per region would have been optimum, ideally spread across the region.
For example, The North Vikings could have teams (franchises) in Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester and York; the Southwest Pirates in Truro, Exeter, Bristol and Bournemouth; the Midlands Maulers in Leicester, Birmingham, Peterborough and Nottingham; the London Colonials in Twickenham, Brighton, Cambridge and Canterbury.
Christ, when you type it out and read it back to yourself, it really does look like contrived shit doesn't it? You can see why the new Welsh teams don't resonate with the fans.
This is before we get to locating the teams where rugby is popular, which you cannot wish away. Rugby broadly succeeds in smaller cities with shit football teams. Leicester is a bit of an exception but their football team traditionally wasn't up to much, London is very big and it has taken a hell of a lot of work for Quins to build a successful fanbase, Sarries and Irish remains a work in progress on that score.
Fonz wrote: Sat Mar 05, 2022 7:15 pm Interesting responses guys, cheers.
Is rugby actually popular in the East of England/East Anglia?
PB: didn't they already try that with Leeds/Yorkshire Carnegie though? Just googled them and seen they're in National League 1 nowadays and reverted to Leeds Tykes...can't help but wonder (as an outsider obviously) if that whole area is just destined to forever be RL territory. Ditto Liverpool and Manchester (though I guess Sale kinda counts as Manchester right?)
I do see their last season in the Prem in 2011-12 they did indeed have attendances basically on par (actually slightly above) Newcastle.
To satisfy my idle curiosity I would love to know which county have produced the most England caps. I would hazard a guess at Yorkshire.Kawazaki wrote: Sat Mar 05, 2022 7:41 pmFonz wrote: Sat Mar 05, 2022 7:15 pm Interesting responses guys, cheers.
Is rugby actually popular in the East of England/East Anglia?
PB: didn't they already try that with Leeds/Yorkshire Carnegie though? Just googled them and seen they're in National League 1 nowadays and reverted to Leeds Tykes...can't help but wonder (as an outsider obviously) if that whole area is just destined to forever be RL territory. Ditto Liverpool and Manchester (though I guess Sale kinda counts as Manchester right?)
I do see their last season in the Prem in 2011-12 they did indeed have attendances basically on par (actually slightly above) Newcastle.
RU is played throughout Yorkshire and at county level they always used to be very strong. I think the two big Leeds clubs were Headingly and Roundhay who played most of the biggest clubs in the UK back in the day and they produced plenty of great players. Sheffield used to be a senior RU club, as did Rotherham and Wakefield. On the other side of the Pennines, Lancashire have arguably, an even greater history of success at RU and they used to be the top dogs at county level. They still might be, I'm not sure.
Could do some digging and number crunching here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category: ... _by_countyHugo wrote: Sat Mar 05, 2022 8:25 pm
To satisfy my idle curiosity I would love to know which county have produced the most England caps. I would hazard a guess at Yorkshire.
Thank you.Niegs wrote: Sat Mar 05, 2022 8:58 pmCould do some digging and number crunching here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category: ... _by_countyHugo wrote: Sat Mar 05, 2022 8:25 pm
To satisfy my idle curiosity I would love to know which county have produced the most England caps. I would hazard a guess at Yorkshire.
There has been a lot of talk this week about the two Championship sides being denied promotion to the Gallagher Premiership because they don't meet the criteria for the stadiums. Being quite frank, neither of the owners of Doncaster nor Ealing want to be promoted. They don't want to have to spend the millions required over the next few years to get up, stay up and be competitive.
The stadium requirements in order to be promoted are clear. If you don't meet them how can you ever think you are going to get promoted, no matter how good your team is? The ownership groups of both clubs don't really want to spend the cash to be promoted and are quite happy in the Championship.
Now, what that tells me is that it is time to ring-fence the Premiership, with the caveat that if a club in the future did present itself for promotion meeting all the correct stadium criteria and the owners are prepared to pay the money to make that next step, then fine, come up. But don't keep complaining. 'The RFU has said we don't meet the criteria' - you know what the criteria are.
There is a bigger picture to all of this, which is that hypothetically ring-fencing the Premiership prompts you to look at how top-flight clubs are being run in England. Think of the volume of players we have. Everyone talks about how many young players there are, but the reality is we waste so much and destroy so much talent through the academy system.
People might read this and think, 'hang on, we have a great academy system'. No, we don't. It's terrible. Hundreds of kids are brought in - take Leicester's reach as far as Norfolk and as wide as Sheffield - and we destroy about 90 per cent of them, if not more.
You can point to Maro Itoje and Freddie Steward as academy success stories, but those guys would have worked their way up through the ranks anyway. They would find their way into teams through a natural progression, rather than an academy. Coaches at that level might think what I'm saying is total rubbish, but it's not. What you get from one player, you sacrifice for a hundred more.
For every hundred players in an academy, one gets a professional contract. Do the maths on that at home. Are you telling me the other 99 kids who don't get a professional contract are not good enough? I don't think that's the case. The other 99 are good enough, just not currently, otherwise they would not have been spotted in the first place.
Think of how many top players were late developers. Lawrence Dallaglio wasn't in an academy. Martin Johnson didn't start playing rugby until much later. Look at Alex Dombrandt now - went to Cardiff Met, played rugby there, now he's a Test No 8.
We have to close all of the academies straight away, so they are gone by next season. I say that because you are giving 15- and 16-year-old boys a club tracksuit and when they get that it means more to them than their education. That is a generalisation and there are going to be exceptions, but those kids in terms of their education would develop slightly better if they were not in an academy. When you're 16 and Leicester or Sale or whoever wants you, you don't care about your maths A-levels. And nor should you, because you have to become dedicated to be a professional player.
When you are in an academy and then don't get that pro-contract, what do you do then? What does it do to your confidence? It damages you. A high percentage will walk away from the game, partly through pride.
The wastage we are seeing with the young talent in this country is due to the academy structure. And I would encourage all the clubs to come together, close the academies and go back to how it used to be. Where you went to your local, smaller club and then became too good for that level, and then the next level up - where they might try and hold on to you, but they know you're too good - until you reach the top of the ladder.
That way you get your full education, you potentially go to university, you are 19 years old and if you are good enough then you are good enough. Just because you haven't spent three years in the gym and played four games a season with players your age does not mean you are any worse off. If anything you are better off. You have played against older, more physical opponents and developed both physically and mentally. You are more robust in both areas.
Think how good the Championship would be with those players involved. You can bring back a national cup competition too in place of the Premiership Rugby Cup.
Staying in the academies, you are just a gym monkey, a piece of meat and you end up getting sold off to some sort of rugby abattoir where you are then cut up. We urgently need to revamp the system.
NFL hopeful Christian Wade believes the sport of rugby union is holding back its stars, a realization he made having made the transition to the glitz and the glamour of American football.
The former Wasps flyer made a major pre-season splash in 2019 for the Buffalo Bills, scoring a 65-yard touchdown with his first competitive touch of an American football.
However, things haven’t gone to plan since, with the pandemic and a poorly timed injury during the 2021 pre-season leaving his NFL career hanging by a thread. A shoulder problem has meant the 30-year-old missed the entire Buffalo Bills’ pre-season, the only time Wade had a realistic chance of making a case for his talents.
Wade hasn’t played a single regular-season down and with his player pathway allowances soon coming to an end, the Bills may well look to onboard a new running back, likely to be at least seven years his junior and with considerably more playing experience.
Put simply, unless he finds a new franchise, Wade’s NFL career appears to be coming to an end. Yet his time hasn’t been wasted and he believes his former sport can learn from the American version of the game that it spawned.
“I love rugby and it’s been part of my journey but at the same time it’s very far away from elite sport in the grand scheme of things,” told The Sun’s Gary Carter. “When I look back, I think, ‘There’s so much more stuff the rugby world can do to push this out there.’
“Rugby has a bigger platform than the NFL, it’s played around the world way more, but it’s almost been contained, a ‘keep rugby a secret’ type of thing.
“It’s time the rugby world opens itself up so it can grow and develop. That’s what it needs.
“Allow players to express themselves, otherwise you’re stopping people from reaching their full potential. That’s how I felt and wanting to look for more is part of the reason I left rugby.
“The NFL has opened up my eyes. There’s a lot rugby can take from the NFL and bring that life back to it again.”
“Rugby union as a whole shouldn’t be centred around England and, ‘You’re with England, now you can be yourself.’
“What about kids who come from school and have no way to express themselves as they’re worried about playing for England? I don’t understand what that’s about.
“You shouldn’t be made to feel a certain way as you’re driven toward England. If you don’t make it, what’s your why? I’ve seen that happen.
“I’ve seen guys I looked up to not be themselves. I was like, ‘What the hell happened?’ When you come through the system, you’re always thinking about playing for England.”
Wade now faces an anxious wait on his NFL future, be should he desire it, he could yet return to his 15-man code. With his partner based in America, such a return may be unlikely, unless he decides to try his hand in the MLR.
I get what he's saying about the discrepancies in how it's all presented, but I have absolutely no idea what he's referring to about players 'expressing themselves'. To take that small point a bit further, I thought that NFL was a game that was ultimately not about expressing yourself, but instead playing to a very analysed, prescriptive playbook and filling a very specific role - although I acknowledge I know very little about NFL so I'm no doubt doing it a disservice.Kawazaki wrote: Mon Mar 07, 2022 1:48 pm Christian Wade chips in...
NFL hopeful Christian Wade believes the sport of rugby union is holding back its stars, a realization he made having made the transition to the glitz and the glamour of American football.
The former Wasps flyer made a major pre-season splash in 2019 for the Buffalo Bills, scoring a 65-yard touchdown with his first competitive touch of an American football.
However, things haven’t gone to plan since, with the pandemic and a poorly timed injury during the 2021 pre-season leaving his NFL career hanging by a thread. A shoulder problem has meant the 30-year-old missed the entire Buffalo Bills’ pre-season, the only time Wade had a realistic chance of making a case for his talents.
Wade hasn’t played a single regular-season down and with his player pathway allowances soon coming to an end, the Bills may well look to onboard a new running back, likely to be at least seven years his junior and with considerably more playing experience.
Put simply, unless he finds a new franchise, Wade’s NFL career appears to be coming to an end. Yet his time hasn’t been wasted and he believes his former sport can learn from the American version of the game that it spawned.
“I love rugby and it’s been part of my journey but at the same time it’s very far away from elite sport in the grand scheme of things,” told The Sun’s Gary Carter. “When I look back, I think, ‘There’s so much more stuff the rugby world can do to push this out there.’
“Rugby has a bigger platform than the NFL, it’s played around the world way more, but it’s almost been contained, a ‘keep rugby a secret’ type of thing.
“It’s time the rugby world opens itself up so it can grow and develop. That’s what it needs.
“Allow players to express themselves, otherwise you’re stopping people from reaching their full potential. That’s how I felt and wanting to look for more is part of the reason I left rugby.
“The NFL has opened up my eyes. There’s a lot rugby can take from the NFL and bring that life back to it again.”
“Rugby union as a whole shouldn’t be centred around England and, ‘You’re with England, now you can be yourself.’
“What about kids who come from school and have no way to express themselves as they’re worried about playing for England? I don’t understand what that’s about.
“You shouldn’t be made to feel a certain way as you’re driven toward England. If you don’t make it, what’s your why? I’ve seen that happen.
“I’ve seen guys I looked up to not be themselves. I was like, ‘What the hell happened?’ When you come through the system, you’re always thinking about playing for England.”
Wade now faces an anxious wait on his NFL future, be should he desire it, he could yet return to his 15-man code. With his partner based in America, such a return may be unlikely, unless he decides to try his hand in the MLR.
I'd agree that rugby is very poorly marketed, particularly the Premiership.
https://www.rugbypass.com/news/christi ... by-union/
What's the source for this? I'd love to see the comments, if possible.Kawazaki wrote: Mon Mar 07, 2022 11:47 am Interesting thoughts from Austin Healey here...
There has been a lot of talk this week about the two Championship sides being denied promotion to the Gallagher Premiership because they don't meet the criteria for the stadiums. Being quite frank, neither of the owners of Doncaster nor Ealing want to be promoted. They don't want to have to spend the millions required over the next few years to get up, stay up and be competitive.
The stadium requirements in order to be promoted are clear. If you don't meet them how can you ever think you are going to get promoted, no matter how good your team is? The ownership groups of both clubs don't really want to spend the cash to be promoted and are quite happy in the Championship.
Now, what that tells me is that it is time to ring-fence the Premiership, with the caveat that if a club in the future did present itself for promotion meeting all the correct stadium criteria and the owners are prepared to pay the money to make that next step, then fine, come up. But don't keep complaining. 'The RFU has said we don't meet the criteria' - you know what the criteria are.
There is a bigger picture to all of this, which is that hypothetically ring-fencing the Premiership prompts you to look at how top-flight clubs are being run in England. Think of the volume of players we have. Everyone talks about how many young players there are, but the reality is we waste so much and destroy so much talent through the academy system.
People might read this and think, 'hang on, we have a great academy system'. No, we don't. It's terrible. Hundreds of kids are brought in - take Leicester's reach as far as Norfolk and as wide as Sheffield - and we destroy about 90 per cent of them, if not more.
You can point to Maro Itoje and Freddie Steward as academy success stories, but those guys would have worked their way up through the ranks anyway. They would find their way into teams through a natural progression, rather than an academy. Coaches at that level might think what I'm saying is total rubbish, but it's not. What you get from one player, you sacrifice for a hundred more.
For every hundred players in an academy, one gets a professional contract. Do the maths on that at home. Are you telling me the other 99 kids who don't get a professional contract are not good enough? I don't think that's the case. The other 99 are good enough, just not currently, otherwise they would not have been spotted in the first place.
Think of how many top players were late developers. Lawrence Dallaglio wasn't in an academy. Martin Johnson didn't start playing rugby until much later. Look at Alex Dombrandt now - went to Cardiff Met, played rugby there, now he's a Test No 8.
We have to close all of the academies straight away, so they are gone by next season. I say that because you are giving 15- and 16-year-old boys a club tracksuit and when they get that it means more to them than their education. That is a generalisation and there are going to be exceptions, but those kids in terms of their education would develop slightly better if they were not in an academy. When you're 16 and Leicester or Sale or whoever wants you, you don't care about your maths A-levels. And nor should you, because you have to become dedicated to be a professional player.
When you are in an academy and then don't get that pro-contract, what do you do then? What does it do to your confidence? It damages you. A high percentage will walk away from the game, partly through pride.
The wastage we are seeing with the young talent in this country is due to the academy structure. And I would encourage all the clubs to come together, close the academies and go back to how it used to be. Where you went to your local, smaller club and then became too good for that level, and then the next level up - where they might try and hold on to you, but they know you're too good - until you reach the top of the ladder.
That way you get your full education, you potentially go to university, you are 19 years old and if you are good enough then you are good enough. Just because you haven't spent three years in the gym and played four games a season with players your age does not mean you are any worse off. If anything you are better off. You have played against older, more physical opponents and developed both physically and mentally. You are more robust in both areas.
Think how good the Championship would be with those players involved. You can bring back a national cup competition too in place of the Premiership Rugby Cup.
Staying in the academies, you are just a gym monkey, a piece of meat and you end up getting sold off to some sort of rugby abattoir where you are then cut up. We urgently need to revamp the system.
He makes some decent points. His hyperbole clouds things a bit (I'm fairly certain the drop out churn is not close to 99/100), but young English players generally are not being well served by many of the Premiership academies (although some are considerably better than others), albeit exacerbated by covid restrictions.
Being cynical I think the translation there is "I was a brilliant attacker but they made me do all this defence-y stuff I wasn't interested in"inactionman wrote: Mon Mar 07, 2022 2:20 pmI get what he's saying about the discrepancies in how it's all presented, but I have absolutely no idea what he's referring to about players 'expressing themselves'. To take that small point a bit further, I thought that NFL was a game that was ultimately not about expressing yourself, but instead playing to a very analysed, prescriptive playbook and filling a very specific role - although I acknowledge I know very little about NFL so I'm no doubt doing it a disservice.Kawazaki wrote: Mon Mar 07, 2022 1:48 pm Christian Wade chips in...
NFL hopeful Christian Wade believes the sport of rugby union is holding back its stars, a realization he made having made the transition to the glitz and the glamour of American football.
The former Wasps flyer made a major pre-season splash in 2019 for the Buffalo Bills, scoring a 65-yard touchdown with his first competitive touch of an American football.
However, things haven’t gone to plan since, with the pandemic and a poorly timed injury during the 2021 pre-season leaving his NFL career hanging by a thread. A shoulder problem has meant the 30-year-old missed the entire Buffalo Bills’ pre-season, the only time Wade had a realistic chance of making a case for his talents.
Wade hasn’t played a single regular-season down and with his player pathway allowances soon coming to an end, the Bills may well look to onboard a new running back, likely to be at least seven years his junior and with considerably more playing experience.
Put simply, unless he finds a new franchise, Wade’s NFL career appears to be coming to an end. Yet his time hasn’t been wasted and he believes his former sport can learn from the American version of the game that it spawned.
“I love rugby and it’s been part of my journey but at the same time it’s very far away from elite sport in the grand scheme of things,” told The Sun’s Gary Carter. “When I look back, I think, ‘There’s so much more stuff the rugby world can do to push this out there.’
“Rugby has a bigger platform than the NFL, it’s played around the world way more, but it’s almost been contained, a ‘keep rugby a secret’ type of thing.
“It’s time the rugby world opens itself up so it can grow and develop. That’s what it needs.
“Allow players to express themselves, otherwise you’re stopping people from reaching their full potential. That’s how I felt and wanting to look for more is part of the reason I left rugby.
“The NFL has opened up my eyes. There’s a lot rugby can take from the NFL and bring that life back to it again.”
“Rugby union as a whole shouldn’t be centred around England and, ‘You’re with England, now you can be yourself.’
“What about kids who come from school and have no way to express themselves as they’re worried about playing for England? I don’t understand what that’s about.
“You shouldn’t be made to feel a certain way as you’re driven toward England. If you don’t make it, what’s your why? I’ve seen that happen.
“I’ve seen guys I looked up to not be themselves. I was like, ‘What the hell happened?’ When you come through the system, you’re always thinking about playing for England.”
Wade now faces an anxious wait on his NFL future, be should he desire it, he could yet return to his 15-man code. With his partner based in America, such a return may be unlikely, unless he decides to try his hand in the MLR.
I'd agree that rugby is very poorly marketed, particularly the Premiership.
https://www.rugbypass.com/news/christi ... by-union/
If it's all about making players media personalities, I'm dead against it but can recognise why the players - and, indeed, club owners and administrators - might think differently. Granted, I'm one of those luddites who were first taken to football by their days at 4 years of age and hate what it's become (admittedly as I have very happy memories of the old Boleyn/Upton Park and no so many of the London Stadium). I'm not keen rugby goes that same way.
Niegs wrote: Mon Mar 07, 2022 3:18 pm What's the source for this? I'd love to see the comments, if possible.
I recently wrote a paper about the futility of academies (not a deep dive, but there seems to be a lot of evidence suggesting they're inefficient across many sports). Some keep going younger to 'capture' talent in the slim chance the promising young teen actually turns out to be a superstar. As I just wrote on PR about a potential girls U18 6N, is anyone crunching the numbers to see if these are actually efficient systems? Supposedly 97% of footballers in academies don't play a minute of senior football. More and more lads are coming from The Championship.
So maybe the traditional path of playing for your club's juniors, colts, getting reserve grade games when you're ready (or playing for a club in a higher tier) is actually much more efficient? Academies saying "these lads made it" might also be counting kids who'd have made it anyway because they were supremely athletic freaks like Barbeary or Wade.
I'm pretty sure they do. The Sale academy players go, somewhat confusingly, to Sale FC and other clubs in the region. It's an issue for players who are on the fringes of the first team of course because your appearences at first are all from the bench, but I don't see how a pathway through the clubs changes that.Kawazaki wrote: Mon Mar 07, 2022 3:32 pmNiegs wrote: Mon Mar 07, 2022 3:18 pm What's the source for this? I'd love to see the comments, if possible.
I recently wrote a paper about the futility of academies (not a deep dive, but there seems to be a lot of evidence suggesting they're inefficient across many sports). Some keep going younger to 'capture' talent in the slim chance the promising young teen actually turns out to be a superstar. As I just wrote on PR about a potential girls U18 6N, is anyone crunching the numbers to see if these are actually efficient systems? Supposedly 97% of footballers in academies don't play a minute of senior football. More and more lads are coming from The Championship.
So maybe the traditional path of playing for your club's juniors, colts, getting reserve grade games when you're ready (or playing for a club in a higher tier) is actually much more efficient? Academies saying "these lads made it" might also be counting kids who'd have made it anyway because they were supremely athletic freaks like Barbeary or Wade.
It was in the Telegraph.
Two things can be true at the same time and the opposite of a good idea can be another good idea. Academies can work but I don't understand why these players can't be in an academy and still playing every week for a National 1 or Championship club in the catchment area of their host academy?
