Keighley fight for their place

RUGBY LEAGUE

RUGBY LEAGUE

BY DAVE HADFIELD

The chairmen who made such sweeping decisions on behalf of the game at the weekend have come - probably not to their surprise - under attack on a series of fronts. The repercussions of the Super League plan accepted on Saturday were echoing around a number of zones of conflict yesterday, with Keighley arguably the angriest victims of the upheavals.

The club, destined for promotion to the First Division next season, but now to be excluded from the Super League and its transitional phase, next season's Premier League, are taking advice from Jonathan Crystal, the lawyer who led Tottenham's successful High Court battle against the Football Association. "We are the losers in all this, but we will fight it all the way," the club's secretary, Jack Wainwright, said.

One of Keighley's many concerns is over their signing of Daryl Powell - a First Division player, signed from SheffieldEagles for a First Division fee, on First Division wages in preparation for the First Division. Powell, this season's England captain, has been in touch with the Rugby League Professional Players' Association, who are taking up his case.

The RLPPA yesterday expressed its "outrage that the[Super League] decision wastaken without consultation and that hundreds of professional players learnt of the decision from television news." The association's chairman, Nic Grimoldby, said: "We are not against change, far from it. But to learn of your future on the television is not the best way of going about it."

Grimoldby fears mass redundancies among the players of merged clubs, and the association's parent union, the GMB, has promised support for legal action should it be required.

Lindsay Hoyle, the chairman of Chorley Borough, now of the National Conference League but still members of the Rugby League, has claimed Saturday's vote was not, after all, unanimous. "I abstained inorder to protect our legal position," he said.

Chorley believe that they have a legal commitment from the League that they can rejoin it if a club drops out. They insist that they should have a place in the new British FirstDivision that will operate below the Super League, and get the £100,000 that goes with it.

Elsewhere, merger talks were starting between club chairmen, but all the indications from one of the proposed composites, Calder, were of fierce opposition at Wakefield, Castleford and Featherstone - the three clubs earmarked to amalgamate. Wigan and St Helens have discussed the possibility of a merger after two years in the Super League, if they felt they could no longer compete individually.