Next season

Times have changed, the RFU will not pay for travel or overnight accommodation anymore, Lymm were promoted fair and square but could not take on the huge travel and associated cost of Nat2 West and have seemingly been able to stay in the North. Leicester Lions were level transferred South, lost all their local derby games which swelled the coffers and travelled the length and breadth of southern England, without the funding to assist wit travel, the Lions might well have struggled. Last year in West league we had a taste of having to fund those costs, this may well have given the club an idea of sustainability in Nat !.

I do not like this talk of watering down, you are insulting clubs and their teams, you are proposing ring fencing through the back door, a thing we all dislike about the Premiership. To use travel as a base for league structure may seem the wrong way to do it, but with rising costs, the need to be more environmentally aware and travel less, maybe it is the logical way. A Nat1 North and a Nat1 South will need time to bed in, but I am sure that if there was a playoff for who went up into Prem 2 it would provide exactly the level of competition we all desire.

Nobody is talking of ring fencing anything 

I am saying stay as we are one National 1 and back to 2 National 2

Top go up 2nd in play off.. bottom 3 from Nat 1 go

The RFU have not put a penny in National 1 for the last 6-7 years..

And yes, National 2 has been watered down..

Yet they were/are happy to turn a blind eye towards those who organised the financial cheating at the top level of the game for years and years. 

The hypocrisy is yet again breathtaking.

It can be the majority of the players in National - and even regional leagues - but a minority of all players.

Going back to 2/4/8 is a retrograde step. In order to reduce overall travel, you need fewer teams in the pyramid, not more.

National league clubs are the minority, so the solution should work for the majority, though it is going to be a compromise. And of course, there are two problems:

- not all the clubs want the same thing

- those clubs that feel the new solution is worse for them will shout loudly, while those who think it is 
  slightly better will quietly get on with life.

The RFU don't control the Premiership, that is the PRL self policing, so no hypocrisy. 

One NL1 club told me it made no sense to travel long distance to play a club in front of a few hundred fans when a similar standard club was a short trip down the road and would draw four times the attendance. To them there was nothing practical in being called a National team, it pushed up costs without any any additional revenue.

I can't imagine they are the only ones who feel like that. 

Yes, the majority play for fees but they don't seek to move for more money. None of our National 1 squad have left because we are playing National 2 next season and so paying lower fees. It's only a minority who play mainly for the money - that was my point.

But isn't the comparison in this case where your local derbies attendances higher or lower on average than the non local derbies? 

This isn't what I am hearing.