ON FRIDAY evening, the 2010 Super League season was kicked off by the reigning champions, the Leeds Rhinos, when they defeated the competition’s new boys, the Crusaders, at the Racecourse ground at Wrexham.
Despite the freezing weather and the snow covered pitch, the game attracted a crowd of over 10,000 and was deemed a success by the Rugby Football League’s spokesmen.
Rugby league has a long history of much-hyped first nights – Cardiff City Blue Dragons, Fulham etc – which have not been followed through to anything like the consistent levels of support required for long-term success.
It would be churlish not to acknowledge the achievement of the Crusaders in staging the game in poor conditions, and then putting up a manful display against the best team in the business; an achievement which is all the more credible when one considers that the Crusaders have been cobbled together, at very short notice, and had never played together before Friday night’s match.
The Crusaders do have a number of potential advantages over some other start ups. Their coaching team is impressive. Brian Noble, the head coach, is a former GB captain who has had long coaching experience with Bradford and Wigan. His two assistants, Iestyn Harris and Jon Sharpe, are very experienced campaigners as both players and, in the case of Sharpe, as a former head coach of the Huddersfield Giants. There is no competing first class sports team in the general Wrexham area and therefore fans who want to watch top class sport, played in its relevant top division, may be persuaded to get behind the Crusaders. Wrexham’s proximity to some of the big Lancashire clubs like Warrington, Saints, Wigan and Salford, could mean that the Crusaders average home crowd is significantly boosted by travelling fans.
However, my belief is that those advantages will not be enough to make the Crusaders a success, because of the fundamental flaws in the thinking of those who decided that moving a Super league club to Wrexham was a good idea.
The creation of a successful rugby league team in Wales has a kind of quasi-mystical significance for too many people in rugby league, and they will do almost anything to see it happen.
They gave a licence for three years to the original owner of the Celtic Crusaders (the lineal forebear of the Wrexham Crusaders) based at Bridgend, when much more well established clubs, like Widnes and Halifax, with real fan bases and plans for development, were denied a licence.
After less than one season the owner said he was moving the team to Newport, then he said he was unhappy with a number of matters and the he decided to bail out: hence the panic move to Wrexham to ‘keep the dream of a team in Wales alive’.
Had the RFL planned to give a licence to a consortium in Wrexham because they were convinced that a) there was some kind of pent up demand for rugby league in north Wales (there is not) or b) that combined with that demand there was a committed, talented and hugely well resourced group of local backers ready to stick it out for the long haul, then the decision to move the Crusaders to Wrexham would have some semblance of purpose.
But, as neither of those two essential pre-conditions exist, I cannot see how this very odd decision has any merit or, more worryingly, any chance of success?
Expansion is a luxury in which only successful businesses can indulge.
If one’s core market is getting smaller, then it is unlikely that expansion will work.
The RFL should concentrate all their modest resources on strengthening the game in its heartlands (which are alarmingly shrinking) and not squander them on silly adventures which waste money and diminish enthusiasm.
