RFL favouritism : Mon May 31, 2021 11:16 am
Allowing us to play York on a narrow pitch that they had agreed to is the latest example of the RFL bending over for Bradford. York having agreed to this over a week ago were totally unaware of the temporary pitch dimensions and James Ford was forced to spend the week on his hands and knees measuring things with a tape measure and not coaching his players. This comes after letting us leave the city to play games. It wouldn’t be allowed for any other club like could you ever imagine watching Huddersfield take on Castleford in a superleague match live on sky sports at Halifax with one of the teams in Halifax replica shirts because of a colour clash? Or Sheffield playing games on a school playground where they have an egg and spoon race to decide who kicks off instead of a coin toss? It just wouldn’t happen. Anyway this sort of thing happens for Bradford Dulls all the time so I thought I’d share my top 5 examples of the RFL breaking their own rules to help us out. What are yours?
1. Russel Smith not penalising the Chris Joynt voluntary tackle bang in front of the posts at the end of the 2002 Grand Final. This was an absolute disk race from the RFL because that meant that Paul Deacon didn’t have to put his superhuman goal kicking record at risk saving him from any embarrassment for one like Don Fox! Second it saved the club the expense of a home coming to parade the trophy in centenary square. Poor old Saints were forced by the rfl to have an open top bus tour while the Dulls players got to go on holidays.
2. Saving us from the predatory approaches of the millionaire owners of wasps and the koukashes when we were in admin. Rfl were only too happy to interfere in the legal process of administration to ensure the club ended up in the hands of a bloke that sold cheap beds on the internet and didn’t even like rugby league. Any other club would have had to deal with the expectation from having cash behind them. Disgusting!
3. In 2017 following liquidation the rfl again put themselves on potentially rocky legal ground by insisting that they wouldn’t allow consortia that had money behind them to start the new business in the bottom division with proper plans to move forward on a sure footing. If that were any other club they wouldn’t have been able to end up in the hands of two skint New Zealanders. No their favourites were able to avoid all that stability and instead got to field a team of kids that got thumped every week before the inevitable relegation. Thankfully opposition fans were helpful enough to remind us how terrible us fans were for decisions made by other people who we’ve never met.
4. Ensuring we aren’t saddled with an elite academy! Ralph Rimmer might claim that it didn’t make the grade but even by their own measure we have a top six academy that’s produced some of the best players fielded by the national side over the last 20-25 years. No they’ve bent their own rules again to help us get away with not having to waste time fielding academy squads where only a few go on to be NRL grand finalists and England captains.
5. Pressurising two professional superleague officials into breaking the rules on the responsibilities of the video ref in order to incorrectly award a penalty for offside that Leeds scored a try off after being stood 20metres in front of the kicker. Just so that their favourites were in the headlines after the first magic weekend. No a crappy 2 competition points putting the Dulls top of the table wasn’t enough for the RFL’s favourites! No they had to ensure that we were the talking point it’s all about Bradford!
