Jay Moore

You may be right about that, seemed like there was a bit of resentment when this was discussed two years ago. Hope it's not too serious to prevent any agreement from being made. Though I will bring up what this thread is saying, our pitch was awful at the end of this season anyway! I agree that we seemed to have trouble towards the end of the season back then, but I would argue that the effect of poor weather over the winter was of similar importance, as it was this season. Short of getting a full roof (which will never happen) I doubt we will ever see a good playing surface at that time of year.

Fair enough, but I still question the logic that the RL team had a significant effect on the pitch. The yeds recent success is surely an incentive to invite them back, if only for the big games against Bradford and Hull KR, just to capitalise on the larger away following, and a few extra home fans that would come back. Obviously it's not a perfect situation, but one team is currently cash-strapped and the other is essentially homeless. The RL club has announced that the Batley game will be played at Sportcity, so that opportunity is lost, while fans will be forced to travel further to get to the game, so an even smaller crowd will turn up.

Honestly, given the record of both clubs since the RL team stopped playing on BP, it seems to me that they were never the problem. They were paying OAFC money to use the pitch, and getting decent crowds at the same time, and now things are very different. For one, Whitebank is a dump of a ground, especially for RL, mostly because the result was often determined by who won the coin toss, and while Stalybridge is a much better ground for them to play on, the attendances have fallen. Meanwhile Latics have been in a relegation fight every single year since the move, and are seemingly in a constant need for money to pay their players. I imagine i'm only seeing things at face value, but Latics really should have offered to let them back on at the start of last spring, given the state of the pitch just from the football, and the calibre of teams Yeds are now playing against (Bradford, Hull KR and last season's Challenge Cup when Warrington visited).