This problem goes back at least 3 years and the decisions made back then are still having an adverse affect on the club today. Now, I consider the Wrexham Crusaders to be a completely different enterprise to that of the one formed in Bridgend but I just wonder whether anyone has actually learnt anything from the mistakes made already.
The Rugby Football League have gotta take their share of the blame for a start. They didn’t allow Celtic Crusaders, as they were then known, to grow into a club that could realistically hold their own in Super League. They basically banged a load of Aussies together, which, don’t get me wrong, did pretty well in their first season and then in their second achieved promotion to Championship One. But then what? That is three years of Rugby League and without a Welsh lad in sight. That is no surprise for those with half a brain, you can hardly expect them to pluck decent young Welsh kids off a bloody tree.
Then they decide to admit them to Super League and give them three years with which to build a club and team capable of sustaining not only a decent squad on the pitch, but a successful business off it. Neither happened. By the end of 2009, the Crusaders were in big trouble and were eventually bought out and the franchise was moved to Wrexham in North Wales, only 30 odd miles from Widnes.
So that’s a new franchise, brand, location, stadium and ownership - practically a completely new club!
Now we’ve seen the Crus go into administration because the holding company who took them on has gone tits up. In a sport like Rugby League, the fast track option is simply never, ever going to work, more so now. You can’t throw money at a club like you can in football and expect it to work. The only time it actually did work was with Maurice Lindsey’s Wigan - but everyone else was part time and the Cherry and White’s were on a full time wage packet - and that was years ago.
This season has seen a new team, South Wales Scorpions, take centre stage in, funnily enough, South Wales. They are made up of predominately Welsh lads who have, in their first season, given a reasonable account of themselves. For the love of God, RFL, do not fast track this lot like you did with the Crusaders. You only have to look at the Harlequins, who have had more name changes than East Hull Growler has had bowl movements at work, to see that there is still no guarantee that with time, patience and a long term plan, that it will work anyway. But I’ve got a good feeling about the Scorpions - and in the next 10 years, we maybe, just maybe, might see a Welsh club in SL who are both stable on and off the pitch, and with local lads who have had the added advantage of been allowed to grow at their own rate without someone pushing them in the back saying ‘get on with it, there’s no time.’
Expansion is an issue that still divides supporters of the greatest game. I’m a fan of the idea in general, just not the way Richard Lewis and Co. go about it. If the Crus are considered to be the flagship of expansion, then surely the likes of Sheffield (35 miles from Leeds) and Blackpool (35 miles from Wigan) can also be considered expansion areas too. Sheffield is as far south as this sport is likely to go and an area were we can realistically grow a successful franchise. Blackpool, or Cumbria, seriously need looking at. That area is crying out for it.
Widnes arguably were demoted from Super League in 2007 because of financial indiscretion, will the Crus lose their licence because of the same reason? Only time will tell, but if they do, the obituary writers better get their pens out.
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