When Widnes Vikings and Wigan Warriors kick off the 20th season of professional summer rugby league on Thursday night, it will signal the sport’s latest bold move. The canny marketing campaigns and clever Twitter hashtags (led by the #RLNewEra tag) may be impressive, but the real acid test for the new league structure is what happens on the field.
Promotion and relegation returns for the first time since Salford were ejected from Super League in 2007 – but in true rugby league style, it just isn’t as simple as that. The top two divisions in the domestic structure, Super League and the Championship, will change from two divisions of 12 teams to three divisions of eight midway through the campaign, with that middle tier perhaps the most intriguing of all.
That league – officially named “The Qualifiers” by the Rugby Football League – will see Super League’s bottom four and the Championship’s top four teams come together after 23 rounds in their respective leagues, beginning the fight for the four remaining places in Super League in 2016.
After every team has played each other once, the top three automatically get back into Super League - with fourth and fifth on the ladder facing off for the final promotion place in what has been named “The Million Pound Game”. The proposed benefits of this system as opposed to straight promotion and relegation? More excitement, more games, and perhaps most important of all, fewer dead rubbers.
The top eight sides will themselves embark on a mini-campaign of their own following the split. They will play each other once, with the top four making the play-offs, where a conventional semi-final system takes over before the two winners meet in the Grand Final.
Throw in the Magic Weekend – where all 12 Super League sides do battle in the same ground over a weekend – moving to a new home at Newcastle United’s St James’ Park, as well as a newly-expanded World Club Series competition, and we have a season that hopes to launch the game to the next level and beyond the M62 corridor of the game’s heartlands.
With only 23 games available to secure a place in the top eight before the split, Widnes and Wigan will be keen to start the season with victory. Widnes’s captain, Kevin Brown, is under no illusions about just how important it is to come out of the traps flying.
“We’re very lucky we get the chance to get the cameras down and get the biggest club in the country down for the first game,” Brown said. “We’ve not done too badly against Wigan at home over the last few years, but we’re under no illusions it will be a tough opener, perhaps the toughest of all.
“Nothing really changes too much for me as a player; you still get the same nerves and I’ll be trying to win every game. You still want to win regardless of what structure has been thrown in front of you. A good start gets you where you want to be; we’re aiming for the top eight, that’s a minimum for us.”
As a lifelong Wigan fan – and former Warriors player himself – Brown admitted that, while there will be a conflict of interest in his own household, he doesn’t really care who is cheering for him, so long as the Vikings can kick off Super League XX with a win.
“I’m a Wigan fan and when I retire I’ll go down and watch their games. My family are all from Wigan, and it’s a special game for me whenever I play them. Being a fan of Wigan means when you beat them, you savour it a bit more.””
