RFL must learn lessons from their lost crusade

THREE years ago, I remember being in a meeting room in Manchester a few months before the RFL made their first announcement on which clubs would be given the first Super League licences.

It was an opportunity for journalists to ask questions of the game's governing body, who were about to enter this new world where performances on the field play second fiddle to snazzy business plans and big promises inside manilla folders.

The RFL lawyer present that day, who did a decent job of convincing the sceptics the process was both completely fair and wholly necessary?

The same man who, this week, delivered the bombshell that expansion club Crusaders were to pull out their application for a 2012 licence — current Crusaders CEO Rod Findlay. The irony is overwhelming.

Theree of the big ideas of Super League licencing were these: financially stable clubs, geographical expansion and better facilities.

The sudden implosion this week of Crusaders, which has arrived despite the RFL's understandable desperation to keep the Welsh outpost afloat — witness the reported recent £700,000 loan handed out by the governing body — and the retention of Wakefield for the next three years despite a very strong Halifax bid smashes each of the aims to bits.

"Every aspect of our application, except one, was very strong and we were the first club to submit in March," Findlay said this week, following the news that shocked everyone in the game. "However, the one part which wasn't so strong was the financial side."

As 'parts' go, that is a real King Lear.

Expansion? Well, it is clear that Celtic Crusaders (as they were formerly known) should have spent longer at a lower level in order to build up, slowly and in stable fashion, to a Super League bid this time around.

You can't rush organic growth by splashing artificial fertiliser all over it.

We still have Catalan Dragons but once-aspirational Toulouse are exiting the Co-operative Championship after this season after a fairly miserable and frankly strategy-less time spent across the channel.

And as for facilities, the continued presence of Wakefield and their shocking Belle Vue home in the competition brings the entire process into disrepute all of itself.

The RFL certainly has a tough job in trying to be fair to all clubs, both expansionist and from the 'heartlands'.

Hopefully it will learn the lessons from this shambles and favour long-term planning over short-term bodge jobs, while also re-evaluating whether licencing as it stands is really much better than the old promotion and relegation system.