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The idea of evolving the game has many people asking many questions, holding many opinions and making many arguments.
Do I have the answer? No, I don’t, and chances are no-one reading this does either. However, I do have an opinion, and it’s neither right nor wrong. An opinion, unlike a fact, is simply what we believe. A fact is Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin will forever be the greatest song of all time.
In 1999 we saw a few lots of two teams merge into one to cut the numbers. Two of them still exist, but this is what I think about the merged teams:
To this day I believe the North Sydney Bears were the logical team to return to the NRL, but we got Manly Sea Eagles instead. Manly is a Sydney suburb of 15,866 people. However, if we were to get all of North Sydney as one, it would go like this:
That makes for a total of 407,993 people.
North Sydney legend Billy Moore is one of many calling for the return of the Bears. A foundation team and with many suburbs to total that figure, the Bears would fill out the stadium big time. Why? Because they were one of the most popular foundation teams of 1908-99 and the crowd numbers tell you as much.
A solution I have come to is to replace Manly with North Sydney. Manly’s members have been dropping like flies over the past few years. THeir 11,375 is the smallest group of all New South Wales teams and the second smallest in the NRL, behind only the Gold Coast Titans.
I remember saying in the past that Manly should stay, but with numbers far too low in terms of membership and attendance, they are a team I believe will eventually run bankrupt if they have too few members. The NRL has made it clear they will not be helping teams stay afloat if they’re in financial problems.
Roarers, what do you think?
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