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| Friday August 31st 2007 |
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| Grass Roots Gossip
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Grass Roots Gossip
That great rugby league enthusiast Terry Flanagan has come up with a marvellous initiative by offering a trophy for the eventual top dogs of the Oldham-based National Conference League Division One trio of St Annes, Saddleworth and Waterhead.
Flanagan’s plan to extract an `Oldham League’ table from derby results between the three sides next season is a good one, and will add extra lustre to what is already a vibrant competition.
I bet others elsewhere are wondering why they hadn’t already thought of it themselves. Hull, for example, could introduce the same thing this season in the NCL’s Premier Division, which includes East Hull, Hull Dockers, Skirlaugh and West Hull. Leeds, a couple of years ago, could have published a separate table for East Leeds, Hunslet Warriors and Milford, who were all in the same section at the time, while there’s been scope on other occasions in towns such as Barrow, Castleford and Wigan.
I’m a bit annoyed, if I’m honest, that I didn’t think of it myself. Older readers of this paper’s predecessor, the Rugby Leaguer, may remember that for a season or so in the mid-nineties I focussed on the West Yorkshire teams in the RFL’s old First Division in a column called `Six of the Best’ and as part of a feature revolving around the coaches published a `Yorkshire League’ table consisting at the time of, I think, Bradford Northern, Castleford, Featherstone Rovers, Halifax, Leeds and Wakefield Trinity.
It was a popular little diversion and I’m sure that Flanagan’s competition within a competition will attract a lot of local interest and plenty of attention from outside Oldham.
In some ways it’s not new of course - in fact the Rugby Football League’s fixture format for many decades, from before the First World War until the advent of two divisions in 1973, was usually based on a County League principle, with a Yorkshire League of 15 teams and a `Lancashire League’ of the same number operating in tandem and games against three or four sides from across the Pennines making up the full table.
Some might argue that it’s a shame we’ve moved away from that system given the manner in which the fortunes of professional clubs, many of them great ones, have now polarised, but that’s another story, although the focus on `derby’ games may revive the debate on whether the lower divisions of the NCL should be regionalised, perhaps after being extended.
That was a proposal mooted three or four years ago and, give the growing strength of teams in the Rugby League Conference, could perhaps be revisited. Imagine, say, a National Conference League comprising something like two top divisions underpinned by North West, North East, Midlands and South Divisions.
They could be fed, as previously envisaged, by the Rugby League Conference and the existing BARLA Regional Leagues of Cumberland, Hull, North West Counties, Pennine and Yorkshire, together with Barrow, which is the only `playing’ District League.
Something to consider, surely, as a means of eventually integrating the entire amateur game under the winter umbrella. That, though, is yet another issue and one which may only be resolved when dire prophesies that global warming is about to have a real impact are either proved or disproved by events.
Phil Hodgson
These are th views of the author and not BARLA
Steve Manning
BARLA Media Manager & PRO
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The British Amateur Rugby League Association.
West Yorkshire House, 4 New North Parade, Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. HD1 5JP, England
Tel: 01484 599113, Fax: 01484 510682, info@barla.org.uk |
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