Sunday's Coming: Swinton

This has been a pisser of a week.

Not enough that Ben Moores has had his season truncated for what appears to be time-wasting; or that Gaz Middlehurst has broken his thumb; or that Jono Smith took another brutal, targeted head-shot that could see his season ended too. Not enough, even, that - by some Rugby League miracle - Swinton came up with a win at in-form Dewsbury on Monday.

All of these would be bad enough to take, but the news from the RFL disciplinary that Lewis Galbraith has ‘no case to answer’ following his sin-binning against Oldham - during which Oldham scored the try that gave them the winning margin - is a bitter, jagged pill to swallow.

Once again, incompetence of the officials and the unwillingness of the RFL to do anything about it have cost Hornets two points and shunted us closer than ever to Oldham and Swinton.

Add Monday’s debacle to the sending off of Jordan Hand at Heywood Road (a game that Swinton won by a point) and the dismissal of Matty Hadden at Batley (another game that slipped through our fingers on the back of a numerical disadvantage) and you have three pretty ordinary refereeing decisions that have had major impacts on our season.

Here at TLCRF80mins, we’re not big on bagging referees - but to misquote Oscar Wilde (again) to be wrong once is unfortunate, twice looks like carelessness. But three times? And who do Hornets turn to for reparation in such cases? Who compensates the players’ loss of winning pay, the club’s loss of two points and - if the worst should happen - who makes up the dramatic drop in central funding?

Week in week out, clubs, players and coaches are held responsible for their actions.  You miss one small detail on match day and the RFL’s match commissioner is in your ear; criticise the officials and they slap you with a fine. But who holds the officials to account? They never have to explain their decisions: it’s  a free pass to make game-changing errors with no comeback.

After every game, coaches front-up and face questions on their side’s performance - good and bad.
Will Gareth Hewer be compelled to face RFL questioning on his performance? Will he face a ban if found guilty of an inability to correctly implement the laws?

Sunday sees Swinton come to Spotland. With the Lions having shoved their huge debt to the back of the kitchen drawer and forgotten about it until October, Stuart Littler seems to have got his charges ticking over and - as mentioned - they arrive on Sunday on the back of a shock 28-35 win at Dewsbury Rams.

Leading 22-6 after 35 minutes, the Lions had enough daylight to fend-off a late, late Rams comeback. Stand-out on the day was centre Chris Hankinson who weighed-in with a try and seven goals for an impressive personal 18-point tally.

With the three clubs above Bradford now squeezed airlessly tight by Monday’s results, this is the most must-win of must-win games. It was always likely to come to this and here we are.

A Hornets win on Sunday would leave Swinton needing to win both their remaining games to overhaul us. An Oldham win too would see the Roughyeds leapfrog Swinton into 6th. It’s a time that calls for cool heads, concentration and strong resolve - from everyone.

The run-ins for this Greater Manchester three-way Rugby League challenge are:

This week
Hornets v Swinton
Oldham v Toulouse

Next Week
Sheffield v Hornets
Swinton v Oldham

Final week
Bradford v Hornets
Toulouse v Swinton
Oldham v Dewsbury

The maths remain pretty simple: as they’ve always been - match or better Swinton and Oldham’s results and we stay up.

It’s edgy stuff and you wouldn’t want to miss it. See you Sunday.

Breaking Point

As Rugby League celebrates its 122nd anniversary this week, we ask: ‘Over a century on, are we heading for a second split due to the unfair treatment of working players?’

Rugby League is a rare sport, one founded on a principle. 

When the public school types of the London-based Rugby Union sneered at the very thought of broken time payments to working Northern players in compensation for losing work wages to play, they drove Lancashire and Yorkshire clubs into forming what a Union apologist described in the Yorkshire Post as ‘a union of their own’. A Northern Union.

At the heart of the split is what we think is a quote that most beautifully crystallises Union thinking at the time. Referenced from several sources - most commonly from the Salford Reporter in the months leading up to the split - it says: “If the working man cannot afford to play, he must do as other people have to do, who want things they cannot afford - do without"

Indeed, the opportunity for ‘The Working Man’ to play Rugby League at the highest level befitting his skill is locked in the DNA of our game - but as Rugby League heads towards its 125th anniversary, we can sense the threat of another ‘working man’ split that could force the game apart.  And - as previously - the forces at work are time, money and fairness.

The European Dream

The Murdoch-isation of Rugby League in 1995 lit the fuse for this current potential implosion: vast amounts of TV money poured in to try and create a fully professional European Super League. Great in principle, awkward in practice.

What Murdoch’s plan failed to understand is that bad teams lose - sometimes quite often.

The European dream that began with Paris Saint Germain beating Sheffield Eagles 30-24 in front of almost 18,000 people in March 1996, lay crashed and burned by May 1997. Not until Catalans Dragons were granted a Super League licence in 2006 did top flight Rugby League re-acquire its much desired ‘European’ dimension.

And that’s worked reasonably well since - full-time professional players on both sides of the Channel able to prepare and travel for fixtures helping establish the Dragons as Super League staple - until this season, where indifferent performances have shunted the Catalans into genuine relegation trouble. Hold that thought.

Canada Goosed

Down in the Championship and League 1, Rugby League’s international dream is causing issues, as full-time Toulouse and Toronto Wolfpack are compelling part-time teams - teams made up of ‘working men’ - to take days off work to travel to fulfil fixtures.

The game already asks a great deal of commitment from its part-time players, but repeated overseas trips (sometimes at short notice), place undue pressure on players’ relationships with employers who already offer incredible (but not inevitable) patience. And many of these guys are family men - Rugby League is not their job and to add needless pressure at home shows little concern for player welfare.

Only this month, Rochdale Hornets’ game in Toulouse required 19 ‘working men’ to ask for Friday off work to travel, play at 8pm on a Saturday night (in a game that ended at almost 11pm), then travel back on Sunday - a journey of over 10 hours for some, as half of the squad had to fly from Limoges (given the short notice of the fixture and the availability of flights) landing home late Sunday night. They then had to set their alarms to go to work on Monday morning, while Toulouse released video of their full-time players relaxing at a theme park.

Similarly, we read this week that Barrow have had to crowd-fund their second trip to Toronto this season after their last trip a) left them £4,000 out of pocket and b) left several of their key players unable to travel. Full-time status of the opposition notwithstanding, such a situation creates an unfair contest - hardly befitting of a game founded on a desire for fair treatment.

How far is too far?

It seems unfair enough to us, that part-time players are asked to travel from Whitehaven to Skolars and back in a day and still have to get up for work, having got home in the early hours of Monday morning. But going back to work having burned two days holiday AND having done two transatlantic flights in four days defies logic. 

But what’s the alternative? Asking ‘working men’ to compromise their livelihoods to play heavily weighted games in Rugby League’s most distant corners runs counter to the principle on which the game was founded. Next year, the Championship could push the situation to breaking point. It’s generally assumed that Toronto will buy their way out of League One, Toulouse have - again - stalled in the second tier and, if the worst happens, the RFL could see Catalans Dragons dropping down a tier.

So you would have a league in which at least half of the teams are part-time, requiring semi-pro players to travel extremely long distances to fulfil at least three fixtures. To misquote Oscar Wilde, asking them to do it once is unfortunate, but three times? Four Times? More times? It’s just not fair, equitable or viable.

It does, however, discriminate heavily against players with jobs. Which is where we came in.

The schism is real

There is already anger amongst Championship clubs who are clearly feeling the strain of managing increasingly unrealistic RFL expectations. In a recent League Express article, three championship coaches voiced their frustrations at having to ask their players to negotiate more time off before embarking on logistically ludicrous trips.  Effectively forcing working players to make the choice between their club and their job - takes us back to square one: “… if the working man cannot afford to play, he must do as other people have to do, who want things they cannot afford - do without”.   

Or, alternatively,  form a game of their own?

If the RFL continues to ignore its treatment of working players, it is in real danger of creating two incompatible versions of the game. Indeed, for us, a natural reaction to excessive demands on players with jobs outside Rugby League would be to push the part-time game closer to the ‘community’ game: with semi-pro/semi-amateur players having a clearer affinity with those who ‘play for sport’. 

Ultimately, it’s the fact that the sport has lost sight of its fundamental principle of fair treatment for working players that saddens us. And in their selective blindness, the RFL shouldn’t just blithely assume that a new split won’t happen. Its own history is against it.