Once again this subject has got people talking sensibly without any bitterness and although we all want different things at the end of the day we all really want the same ........... a team with a future to follow.
I cannot understand why people when they talk about a new club think for one moment that it's team will contain the majority of the players at either Town or Haven now!!! A new club would need to negotiate a deal on the lines of the Catalans where they were given 3 years of unlimited quota players, etc. Why does everyone assume that a new team in SL would be getting thrashed every week??? Yes, if either Haven or Town ever managed to get to SL, then they would get thrashed every week and I would go as far as to say and go bankrupt as well.
This area is too small to provide the major finance that would be required to support a one town team. With a county team we have the whole of the county (except Furness area) to draw on and even over the Scottish border if the club was marketed right. None of us on here have either the acumen, the financial clout or the contacts in industry etc to make this happen and that is why we are reliant on others sharing that view who could pull it together.
At present our directors at both clubs have their hands full with trying to keep two NL clubs afloat, with one doing a bit better than the other, but for how long??? I honestly believe that at the end of next season when the drawbridge comes up on P & R we will all see a difference at both our clubs. With no real prize to aim for people will drift away from the game and find other interests just as they have done in the past. Town in SL averaged around 3,000 and are now down to 700. Those people are still around but doing something completely different on match days. Similarly with Haven averaging around 2000 - 2500, but in 3 years they also could be down to 700 or so. Is this what we really want to see happening???
To answer a point I made earlier about the players would all vote for a new club, maybe I should have said the younger players would have done so. Those players who are getting a bit old in the tooth with good jobs will never give that up to take the chance but both our clubs have some very good young players who, given the right circumstances and coaching staff, would consider taking the chance to try to reach SL without having to move away from home. At present a young lad gets to turn pro and he gets a good day job and he then is stuck between a rock and a hard place of having to move away to try his luck with no security.
Obviously, it's not going to happen because it needs the will of both clubs, directors, fans, players, coaches, etc, to sit down and discuss it in a sensible manner not just presuming that they would go bust inside 3 years or get thrashed every week. It needs a large input from the RFL, SL and industrialists but they won't do anything until this area shows that it wants to have a go and therein lies the problem. We all sit in our own little comfort zones happy to stay where we are with little or no hope of progress with an attitude of "so what if we drop down to 400 crowds again I'll still be there". Meanwhile the RL world will have long since passed us by and given up on us.
