This week, Rugby League fans crawled blinking from their fallout shelters to watch the sun rise over a brave new world where Super League calls the shots and everyone else follows in line awaiting their share of the crumbs.
Ralph (‘the’) Rimmer has drawn a metaphorical ‘Line in the Sand’ over structural arguments in an attempt to halt the internecine squabbling that has blighted relationships within the game - but the game’s Yorkshire-led militant wing are still seething tnis week after nine Championship and League 1 clubs voted - turkey-style - for Xmas.
Thd most immediately visible impact on the game is in the structure: a 12 team Super League, a 14 team Championship a 12 team League 1 - and the death knell for the Super 8s as Super League’s protectionist standpoint (why DOES everything in this game HAVE to have to be described as ’super’?), makes only one direct promotion place available
Unless you’ve been in a coma for a fortnight, you can’t fail to have been stunned by the almost unfathonmable stupidity of the systen the RFL has come up with to extend the Champioonship to 14 clubs. Rather than just stick with two up (as League one has played for all season) and suspend relegation for a year, the brains at Red Hall have come up with a convoluted playoff between the loser of the League 1 promotion playoff final and the bottom club in the Championship.
And if none of that causes you to doubt the sanity of the RFL, the venue for this Ridiculous Relegation Shithouse Playoff™ will be decided by a coin toss. Risible.
What all this knavish chicanery does do is offer Hornets the slightest of lifelines. All we have to do is not finish bottom. And all we have to do to achieve that is win the last two games and hope Swinton don’t win again.
Worth noting that Swinton have a +82 points difference advantage over Hornets, so winning just one of the remaining games would require a) us to put on a big score and b) Swinton to ship a bagful - the alternative might be having to go to Whitehaven having failed on points difference. Imagine that…
Game one of Hornets’ series of two ‘cup finals’ arrives on Sunday when the Rams of Dewsbury heave into view. Comfortably ensconced in 4th place in the now redundant Championship Shield, Dewsbury have demonstrated that it is possible for a relatively small club to make a meaningful dent in the Championship.
The Rams come to Spotland on the back of a 40-28 defeat at Featherstone; a game which coach Neil Kelly saw as mistake-ridden. Speaking in the Dewsbury Reporter this week he said that he thought Dewsbury could have given a better account of themselves: “ … I thought we could have given a better account of ourselves. If we had given a better account of ourselves, maybe we would have threatened to win the game instead of just making for a high-scoring game.”
Shipping three tries at the end of the first half left the Rams with too much to do, and Kelly recognises that his side has errors in them: “We do enough wrong to take away from the massive amount of things that we do right. Moments like that, just before half time and moments like that in the second half are the reasons why we are not higher in the league this year.
It is typical of the Dewsbury season this year, you show a bit of promise and then you do something wrong.”
Key to Dewsbury’s effectiveness is wiry/wily veteran half Paul Sykes. Last week he racked up his 500th point for the Rams (now 515 points in 82 appearances). Impressive.
Meantime, Hornets remain frustratingly close to grabbing some much-needed points. An eight point defeat to Leigh reflected our season in microcosm: dazzling football, undeniable commitment - and a recurring raft of sloppy errors that simply place too much pressure on the defence in all the wrong bits of the field.
Whilst the league table doesn’t lie, it would be exasperating to exit the Championship as ‘nearly men’. With nothing to lose and everything to gain, Hornets have 160 minutes of the 2018 season remaining to prove people wrong.
Time to be bold.
See you Sunday.
