AFTER three seasons of lurching from one crisis to another, it was perhaps inevitable that rugby league’s latest expansion adventure into Wales would end with a whimper, rather than a bang.

With the Rugby Football League (RFL) set to announce which clubs had been awarded the next set of three-year licences, starting next season, the expectation was that Wakefield Trinity Wildcats would be punished for their recent period in administration and crumbling stadium with demotion.

But that was without factoring in rugby league’s almost bottomless capacity for bureaucratic catastrophe and cock-up.

Wrexham-based Crusaders had gone all the way through the RFL’s vetting procedure, a process that takes gigantic amounts of time and money, and for which the RFL employ a small army of people on fancy salaries, who scrutinise and evaluate, at several stages, all the licence applications.

Naturally there is also plenty of outside help, with property consultants Savills, accountants KPMG and governance and business management experts at Leeds Metropolitan University all providing their input into the decision-making process.

But before the chairman of the RFL could tell the press who were the lucky winners of the licensing lottery, his thunder was stolen with the news that Crusaders had withdrawn their application.

The players had been told just minutes before, while signings for next season like Great Britain international Keith Senior found out on the television, before venting his justified anger on Twitter.

There are not enough pages in the Yellow Pages, never mind this newspaper, to adequately describe the sheer breath-taking incompetence of the RFL.

In the light of what has happened at Crusaders it will be no surprise to know that the Crusaders chief executive was the RFL’s former in house lawyer: you really could not make this up.

Just like it’s still hard to comprehend how we got to this sorry point. In 2008 the RFL gave a three-year Super League licence to a team in south Wales called Celtic Crusaders, in preference to Widnes Vikings.

Shortly after getting their licence, it became clear that Celtic Crusaders were not viable, and after some extraordinary manoeuvring and amidst speculation that the whole process had been a fiasco, the RFL transferred the licence at the end of its first season.

The new club, called just Crusaders, was moved to the rugby hotbed and bustling north Wales metropolis of Wrexham.

Its failure has always been a question of when, not if.

There is only one thing for the Super League clubs to do.

They must hold the RFL to account, sack the scores of incompetent time servers and talentless apparatchiks, hire good people, devise a plan which makes sense for the future of the game, work out how to fund it, attract decent sponsors (they do not have a title sponsor for Super League for next season and are scrabbling round with the begging bowl) and wake up to the fact that the game needs fundamental reforms if it is ever to find a wider audience.

Will they do it? Who knows?

History suggests not, but for the sake of the great sport of rugby league, I hope they do.