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Brave new dawn, or another fine mess? At least things have started to happen two weeks from the start of the 19th Super League season with confirmation of a restructure from 2015 and the announcement of First Utility as new sponsors but, this being rugby league, that has prompted as much grumbling as cheering.
At least the Super League clubs seem to have resolved to show a united front. A significant minority – led by the champions, Wigan – were deeply sceptical about the radical and risky proposals for 2015 and beyond, whereby two 12-team leagues will reform as three eights for the business end of the season. Having been outvoted, the Wigan chairman Ian Lenagan and his followers appreciated that further complaint would be damaging. Perhaps now it's time for the players, who were also volubly unimpressed by the initial proposals, and even us media miseries to follow their example.
It's actually pretty easy to sell the new concept as a major improvement on what has gone before. At least the bloated top eight play-offs, which have done such insidious damage to Super League's credibility for the last few years – Danny Brough's admission that Huddersfield do not even want to finish top of the table this season being merely the latest example – will disappear.
Now the top 12 will effectively be competing for places in a four-team play-off with a straight knockout, which seems to have worked pretty well in rugby union's Premiership. The reduction of Super League from 14 teams to 12 is a recognition that the competition needs to be more consistently intense, and the strugglers will be battling to avoid being dumped into the middle tier of eight for the last third of the season which will carry the risk of relegation to the second tier of 12 the following year.
That is a complicated paragraph and here is one problem – this system is going to take a bit of explaining, especially in a land where the enduring simplicity of football's promotion, relegation and first-past-the-post is king. There were similar complaints about the top five play-offs when they were imported from Australia in 1998 and they were accepted quickly enough – many of us have been calling for their reintroduction in recent years as a far better option than the evil top eight.
The greatest selling point of the new system, which has been conveniently overlooked by that loveable rugby league community whose default setting is on carp, is that it does reopen a clear pathway to Super League for ambitious clubs.
So for Workington, Halifax, Leigh or Doncaster, to name four clubs whose potential was reawakened by a sprinkling of magic dust from last autumn's World Cup, the first target is to make the cut this season for the second tier of 12 next – presumably that would mean finishing in the top 10 of the Championship, or nine if the rumours of Toulouse resuming cross-Channel competition prove correct.
Then they would have to secure a place in the top four of that 12-team league by the cut-off point, after 22 or 23 rounds. Then they would have a seven-match crack at finishing above at least one of the four teams who had been demoted from the top 12 at the same stage . If successful, they would start the following season in the Super League, facing Wigan, Leeds, St Helens and the rest.
That's major progress, surely? The task now is explaining it.
As so often during the Super League era, much depends on Sky's attitude to the shake-up. This is dangerous territory for someone who has accepted the Sky shilling to talk rubbish on Backchat on fairly regular occasions over the last few years but my impression is that the broadcasters who played such a key part in the development of rugby league's revolutionary change in 1996 have fallen out of love with the game.
Not the rugby league team, obviously – love them or loathe them, Eddie, Stevo and their colleagues remain fiercely evangelical about the game, sometimes to a counterproductive extent. It's their bosses in London who don't seem all that keen, at least on the evidence of their loss of rights to the Championship, the National Rugby League and the World Cup to Premier Sports.
You could not really blame them, as Super League has stagnated, at best, over the five years since licensing was introduced and the top eight play-offs have been disastrous. It would have been a surprise if that, and the constant squabbling between various sectors of the game, had not done some damage to viewing figures.
Sky have already lost rugby union's Premiership to BT Sport, and are in danger of having the European Cup snaffled as well. The row that has been rumbling for months in the other code seems from this distance to be their version of the Super League War between Murdoch and Packer that convulsed Australian league in 1995-96. That hands league in this country a huge opportunity and it is possible to see the restructure proposals as an imaginative attempt to seize it.
Sky's Super League deal runs until the end of the 2016 but does not involve any Championship coverage. Might they be prepared to pay a little more from 2015 to offer content from the second tier, now that promotion and relegation has been reintroduced? It's certainly feasible to imagine an arrangement under which Premier continued as the main Championship broadcasters but Sky weighed in once the two 12s had split into three eights.
The second tier could include crucial derbies between local rivals such as Featherstone and Castleford, fallen giants battling to avoid relegation such as Bradford, and is also the context in which attempts to spread the lower leagues geographically in the last couple of years should be viewed. Semi-professional teams based in Oxford, Cheltenham and Hemel Hempstead are already playing in Championship One, and there is a realistic prospect of others from Bristol, Leicester and Gillingham joining them. Now they all have a potential pathway to the FU Super League, too.
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