Re: Play off system stays. : Wed Nov 30, 2011 10:45 pm  

Top Saint wrote:

Easy answer in my opinion. Include all home cup games in the price of a season ticket. Already paid for so people will try to attend.

But how would it be funded?
How would the cup then "make money"?
It would need an increase in the price of season tickets and than what happens if you are drawn away?

And why would a team with say 10,000 season ticket holders subsidise one with 1,000.

Re: Play off system stays. : Thu Dec 01, 2011 9:32 am  

Rogues Gallery wrote:

But how would it be funded?
How would the cup then "make money"?
It would need an increase in the price of season tickets and than what happens if you are drawn away?

And why would a team with say 10,000 season ticket holders subsidise one with 1,000.

What I'm suggesting is that the option to pay extra for cup and playoff games should be offered at the time you purchase your season ticket. After all 6000 paying full price equates to the same as 18000 paying a third of the price.
The big plus is that the club would then gain on extra income from normal matchday revenue such as food and drink. The additional cost would equate to, say, 3 games, but Saints or Wigan ( Barring a cup disaster) would play more than 3 cup and play-off games a season and more people in the stadiums for these games gives a much better atmosphere.

Re: Play off system stays. : Thu Dec 01, 2011 9:46 am  

Top Saint wrote:

What I'm suggesting is that the option to pay extra for cup and playoff games should be offered at the time you purchase your season ticket. After all 6000 paying full price equates to the same as 18000 paying a third of the price.
The big plus is that the club would then gain on extra income from normal matchday revenue such as food and drink. The additional cost would equate to, say, 3 games, but Saints or Wigan ( Barring a cup disaster) would play more than 3 cup and play-off games a season and more people in the stadiums for these games gives a much better atmosphere.

Nobody can predict how many cc games any team will play or if the team will even make the play offs so it would be very hard to include it in season ticket prices.

Re: Play off system stays. : Thu Dec 01, 2011 12:59 pm  

Northampton_Saint wrote:

You want to keep a system that penalises true champion teams by stopping them reaping the rewards of their hard-earned superiority by giving the mediocre waste of space teams an unfair chance of beating them on a single off-day and becoming "champion" teams instead. You want to penalise quality and reward s**t.

You're a big fan of baseball right? It has 162 games a season and yet the team which has won the most games during the regular season has won it what? Once in the past ten years or something similar. Whenever I talk to you all I hear is our shared love for that game and rarely do you denigrate its format and the way that betrays the game. Aren't those 162 games a meaningless slog? Why do you not take the same attitude towards RL? You even go on holiday to take in the brilliance of baseball and rightly so yet those games mean even less than RL's because there are so many of them.

I've been thought this a million times on these forums specifically about this non-truth that keeps on getting peddled about a league format rewarding quality so I've cut and paste something I posted from a few months back.

McClennan wrote:

What a load of poppycock. Before organised sport if you wanted to be the champion you had to seek out the best and beat them. Every single round of Super League, every contest is a straight head-to-head test and what more fitting a way to be crowned champion than to have done it by beating the best. Champions shouldn't be selected on the basis of who has managed to win the higher percentage of victories. They should be selected on who is able to climb the highest to perform because that's what a champion performance is made of.

Champions are assessed not on how many they win it's how they perform. How they respond to adversity and the challenge of beating the best.You earn the champions tag through performance not consistency. Consistency helps to put you in a position but when you go to war, when you go to battle it's out on the field it's decided mano-a-mano. You shouldn't learn that you've become champion because Tony Smith's men have lost at a battle in Hull which means you win the title. You should defeat them yourself.

You rise to the top and you stay there until somebody comes along and knocks you off your perch. You only lose that spot when somebody comes along and beats you in the arena and not by suffering a depleted squad in the first ten games of the year. To be a champion team you need to be special and not just lose less games than the team below you. After all why wouldn't you want your sports most important game of the season to be the last one?

The greatest moments in sport are created when the chips are down. It's when titans rise to the top. It's how we assess individual performance i.e. the ability to perform at the highest level and to the highest standard when it means the most. When people talk of Wally Lewis, Darren Lockyer, Andrew Johns etc. they talk of them as champions because they have done it when it mattered and not because they managed to rattle up a six try haul vs Goldcoast Titans. If we constantly assess our players' legacies against their performance in games that matter why shouldn't we do that with our teams also because we do. Sean Long is considered a modern day Saints great. Why? Because he was a big game player, perhaps the biggest over here since the professional era began. Champions are made in the arena not on a league ladder.

Re: Play off system stays. : Thu Dec 01, 2011 1:09 pm  

Tony Stark wrote:

Some people meaning me in particular? Look I neither claim to be a historian of the game, nor do I care to be in future, I appreciate where the game has come from but prefer not to get bogged down by 'tradition' in lieu of my enjoyment of the sport.

No sorry Tony. It was a general comment about how RL supporters are too easily influenced by football and think our sport should be like their's (commonly found in people who attend both sports). I'm not suggesting that's you or Northampton btw, just commenting that it's been allowed to take hold in some areas of our community. RL is a completely different sporting contest. It might have ties to the same communities but it has different belief sets, values and attitudes towards its own game.

Tony Stark wrote:

Those currently in charge at Red Hall, and at 99% of the clubs have made the decision to retain the current format, I can only speculate but I suggest that the driving reason for this is for monetary reasons, rather than sporting ones.

I've just given an ethical, moral and logical reason above why the play off format is selected. To suggest the most important driver is monetary disregards any feeling people have for the sport. Now whilst this game is a business, at its heart is the pure joy, excitement of the sport and the universally held belief that it is the best sport in the world. To suggest that money is the biggest driver criminally ignores that ethic we have always had.

Re: Play off system stays. : Thu Dec 01, 2011 1:19 pm  

St pete wrote:

Nobody can predict how many cc games any team will play or if the team will even make the play offs so it would be very hard to include it in season ticket prices.

Then just quote a blanket price for a season ticket which includes all home games or have a rebate system in which the club expects a certain number of cup and play-off games in a season, and if this number is not reached the club refunds a set amount for each game less.
I am suggesting options to fill the ground on cup and play-off days, so if you think this is a bad idea how about coming up with ideas of your own. We all want full stadia on matchdays because of the atmosphere it generates.

Re: Play off system stays. : Thu Dec 01, 2011 2:02 pm  

Perhaps the best starting place about play off attendances would be to ask the supporters first. Pretty much everybody I know who has a season ticket goes to the play off games so who are these people who decide not to go after going during the season (assuming they do that in the first instance)? Why don't they attend? Without that information we're flogging a dead horse.

Re: Play off system stays. : Thu Dec 01, 2011 5:13 pm  

Top Saint wrote:

Then just quote a blanket price for a season ticket which includes all home games or have a rebate system in which the club expects a certain number of cup and play-off games in a season, and if this number is not reached the club refunds a set amount for each game less.
I am suggesting options to fill the ground on cup and play-off days, so if you think this is a bad idea how about coming up with ideas of your own. We all want full stadia on matchdays because of the atmosphere it generates.

I'm not having a go mate but not a chance in hell any club would use that system.

I'd fear I'd never see my money again if the club goes in to financial difficulties.

Maybe all season ticket holders get a percentage knocked off for play off games or CC games?

Re: Play off system stays. : Fri Dec 02, 2011 2:39 am  

McClennan wrote:

You're a big fan of baseball right? It has 162 games a season and yet the team which has won the most games during the regular season has won it what? Once in the past ten years or something similar. Whenever I talk to you all I hear is our shared love for that game and rarely do you denigrate its format and the way that betrays the game. Aren't those 162 games a meaningless slog? Why do you not take the same attitude towards RL? You even go on holiday to take in the brilliance of baseball and rightly so yet those games mean even less than RL's because there are so many of them.

I've been thought this a million times on these forums specifically about this non-truth that keeps on getting peddled about a league format rewarding quality so I've cut and paste something I posted from a few months back.

Errrr..... I think you might be getting me confused with someone else matey - I have a sneaking regard for baseball perhaps, but hardly a "love" and we've definitely never discussed it before (trust me, I'd have remembered)... And anyway, you simply can't compare US sporting culture with ours on any level and it's simply ludicrous to even try. And at least in baseball only an elite minority of the teams in the competition get to play in the playoffs at all, making all those games that have to be hacked through worthwhile, tense and exciting for the top teams and their fans. The Yankees may spend big and get to the playoffs more seasons than not as a result, but it's never guaranteed and they have to work damned hard and play to the top of their game most days to make sure it happens. On the other hand I could play #7 for Saints next season and they'd still make the playoffs without hardly bothering to turn up most weeks - that's the difference. The average superleague season supporting a club like Saints certainly feels like it's 162 games long these days....

Anyway, the simple fact is you're wrong, wrong, wrong. Becoming "champion" by winning just 3 games at a random point in the season (that just happens to be at the end of the season, though I hardly see what difference that makes) is a preposterous way to decide who your "best" team is over the course of a whole season. If that's the system you want then fine - I'll just move to football supporterdom permanently leaving the lunatics to run the RL asylum, and I'll be perfectly happy with seeing results that matter every week for my 25 quid instead. But for God's sake, scrap the pointless 27 game charade leading up to it and stop ripping the punters off of their hard earned to see a long stream of games rendered dreary, soulless, pointless, dead and utterly worthless by the whole sorry, manipulative, cynical money grubbing exercise that it so unashamedly is.

Re: Play off system stays. : Fri Dec 02, 2011 8:36 am  

St pete wrote:

I'm not having a go mate but not a chance in hell any club would use that system.

I'd fear I'd never see my money again if the club goes in to financial difficulties.

Maybe all season ticket holders get a percentage knocked off for play off games or CC games?

I didn't think you were having a go. I just think it's frustrating seeing empty stadia for cup games.
If the club stated that rebates were payable for less than 3 games then most of the top 8 clubs would benefit.
It might even encourage people who wont go because of the lack of interest to attend.