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I will give this lot a call when I am next in London.Fireworks wrote:Is there some proof that the offender is male. Would IT not be more appropriate.offshorerules wrote:I've just learned that the male wasp does not have any sting. It surprised me but it really shouldn't have.
Hornet wrote:I will give this lot a call when I am next in London.Fireworks wrote:Is there some proof that the offender is male. Would IT not be more appropriate.offshorerules wrote:I've just learned that the male wasp does not have any sting. It surprised me but it really shouldn't have.
http://beckenham.able-pest.co.uk/wasp-control.html
Neath and Swansea were co-owners of the Ospreys until 2009 when the directors fell out and the Swansea owners and one of the Neath owners bought the team. The Neath shareholder that was forced out, Geriant Hawkes, and who remained in charge of Neath has just been arrested for money laundering. I am sure you are well aware of that.JB1973 wrote:Beckenham Wasp wrote:There are a few differences between the Ospreys and the Cardiff and Ponty situation. Firstly the Ospreys is an equal partnership between two clubs of a similar standing and a partnership of equals. It still is. In a Cardiff and Ponty tie up Cardiff were always going to be the dominant party. More money, more supporters, more everything.JB1973 wrote:"What would you call a team based in Cardiff that people from Pontypridd would want to support? What name would you use? East Glamorgan? The Valley Blues? There isn't any natural affinity between the two."
the same was said about Swansea and Neath when the Ospreys were formed, but no one even mentions it.
Common sense dictates you'll have far more chance of getting fans from outside Cardiff if you have a neutral name (Glamorgan ?) play in a new kit and play your lv games around the region. The team can still be based in Cardiff but at least it would represent the whole of the region then.
Sorry BW but there is no logical argument you or the blues board can put forward that can disagree with the above.
I'm just glad your here to give me your in depth analysis of welsh rugby I'd be lost without it
Also soon after they were created Ospreys moved into a new shared stadium that wasn't affiliated to either of the two clubs giving the new team a sense of it own identity in a way they wouldn't have had if they played predominantly at one of the two old grounds.
Thirdly Ponty aren't bringing anything to the table. They tried to remain at the top table with the Celtic Warriors but they ran out of money after less than one season and they went bust. If Ponty slapped a wad of cash on the table and said to the Cardiff Blues that they wanted a slice of the action then fair enough. They haven't and they won't. Most people in Ponty are still deluding themselves that they can create a 5th professional team based just in the Valleys.
Also the "Regions" aren't regional teams. They are private professional teams owned by clubs and funded by private individuals. The Ospreys are still the Neath-Swansea Ospreys and they all ways will be so long as they are owned by Neath and Swansea. Bridgend and no other clubs in West or South Glamorgan own them or fund them. The same goes for all the "Regions". So long as Llanelli, Swansea, Neath, Cardiff and Newport remain the owners that bankroll professional rugby in Wales the "Regions" will remain will just be rebadged club sides and will behave as such. The Blues "region" doesn't exist. It is just a professional team owned by Cardiff RFC.
If the WRU wants proper Regional teams then it has to put its hands in its pocket and fund professional rugby in Wales unaided. It has to centrally contract all of the professional players and coaches, commercially manage them and find grounds that they can play at.
sorry to rain on your parade but the ospreys are actually the majority shareholders of bridgend rfc so i do think they are part of the set up, we also play our home lc cup games there .
I'm not sure where your getting that neath/swansea own the ospreys from either, if you mean some of the shareholders were ex directors at swansea and neath then you maybe on the right track
They restructured their repayments in the stadium to pay off the debt twice as fast as they needed to. Imagine if someone did that with their mortgage? They would be eating turnips for breakfast, lunch and dinner. That is what the Welsh clubs are currently doing. Eating turnips. Unnecessarily.paddyor wrote:Is that a fact. Like it's twice as quickly as they need to or is it in you or someone else's opinion "twice". The RRW are quite separate from the rest of the game in Wales and have little support amongst the Welsh public and clubs to the position on the stadium debt of the WRU. A majority want rid of it and are prepared to take the short-medium term pain for the long term gain. It's also a big contrast to the Scots whose stadium debt is stabilized but not falling and have invested heavily in it's 2(3) "regional" teams with little in the way of any tangible gain.Beckenham Wasp wrote: Part of the problem is the WRU is paying down the debt of the Millenium Stadium twice as quickly as they need to and taking money away for the clubs and the professional teams to do so.
Rightly they believe that strengthens the central WRU vs the clubs and the professional teams. It is cynical and it isn't in the interests of Welsh rugby as a whole.
The RRW btw are hardly a great example of private ownership. The PWC report was scathing in it's assessment of their running of the club game(no marketing, expensive shoddy imports etc.). Increasingly their budgets make a huge difference in retaining the talent they need to be competitive but they were mostly a shambles before that became an issue. Why should the WRU pump so much money into loss making privately owned organizations that do so little to promote the game in Wales(I'd also argue deliver talent as they seem to have terrible coaching).
The difficulty of the clubs beneath the pro level is mirrored in other parts of the world and isn't just due to a lack of funding. There are many factors, economic, increased competition from soccer, demographic changes etc. They don't seem to blame all this on the WRU though. I followed a conversation between a Welsh Assembly member and Simon Thomas on twitter and his view was he asked the local clubs in Rhondda(IIRC his constituency) if they had an issue with it and they said no. There's a disconnect between the RRW and other clubs such that the others see their interests being in conflict with the RRWs.
You do know that that article is complete nonsense. Especially the part about declining attendances. Saracens neither control or represent Premier Rugby. They are just one of 12 clubs and only have one vote.paddyor wrote:Go easy on the wasp there's just less people at the games to annoy so he comes on here.Hornet wrote:Classic symptoms of being a Billy no mates. Wait until he starts banging on with his xenophobic views of Irish History. It will crack you up. Look on the bright side. The Munsterfans forum had cracked and banned him a long time back. We must be made of sterner stuff!enby wrote:It must be great to be a know-all, BW. I envy your absolute conviction that you are right on such diverse topics as Welsh rugby, salary caps, World Cup venues, Pro12 attendances, PRL finances etc etc.
We are not worthy
The rest of the articleLondon Irish, London Wasps, Newcastle Falcons, Northampton Saints, Sale Sharks, Saracens and Worcester Warriors have each seen crowds drop for regular home matches compared with the boom year of 2009-10, when the Premiership had its record average attendance since leagues began in 1987.
Wasps have been hardest hit, with the average crowd at Adams Park tumbling from 8,542 in 2009-10 to 5,759 this season, a 32.58 per cent reduction.
Even at the four clubs where crowds have risen – Bath (plus 1.87 per cent), Gloucester (8.69 per cent), Harlequins (10.31 per cent) and Leicester (0.6 per cent) – their stadiums are often short of being sold out.I think this rubbishes the claim that the AP is as lucrative as the Top14 and also shows that the IRFU were/are well able to compete with them in the event of both losing the HEC revenue. In total I'd say we have maybe 5 high value overseas players in the 4 provinces and maybe 3/4 others of interest to the AP teams.......Saracens are calling for relegation from the Aviva Premiership to be abolished and the salary cap radically altered to include a minimum spend on players and the scrapping of the upper limit, in order to attract the world’s best players to the competition instead of going to France and Ireland.
The league leaders say it is now or never for England’s clubs to up their spending and take advantage of a “golden opportunity” for growth, with England hosting the World Cup in 2015, Sevens joining the Olympic Games in 2016, and rugby’s values of discipline and respect being compared favourably with football’s.
The demand for change coincides with the negative news that more than half the teams in the Aviva Premiership have suffered a fall in attendances this season compared with the record levels of four years ago.
Ah, ah I see. They won't be happy until they've signed an Irish international will they?But Saracens have been buoyed by turning an estimated £500,000 profit from their club world record 83,889 crowd at Wembley last weekend, and the north London side’s chief executive, Edward Griffiths, believes the likes of Lions stars Leigh Halfpenny, Jamie Roberts and Johnny Sexton and southern-hemisphere luminaries Bryan Habana and Luke McAlister should be diverted from France’s Top 14 into the Premiership.
“For the next three or four years the Premiership collectively needs to take urgent steps to make it loud and clear we are open for business and encouraging people around the world to invest,” said Griffiths.
Oh and Nigel Wray wants to sell!I'd love to know how they'd enforce that, if a club didn't/couldn't spend to the salary cap minimum. I love that sentence about some clubs are looking at us and saying we're cheating but they need to realize it's for their own good! I think his fear of the French is well founded though. After the RWC15 I'd say a lot of fringe/unsure England players will hop the channel, Toby Flood being a good example.“The salary cap keeps the league competitive but if the best players go to France or Ireland then we won’t be the leading league. And relegation is the sword of Damocles – who wants to invest heavily in a club if they could be out of the league in one season? People say to me, ‘what would happen if an Arab businessman bought a club and wanted to buy Dan Carter and Richie McCaw?’ and I’d say ‘great, fantastic – that’s what the league needs’. We do not need a league of clubs that are just trying to survive. It is no good a promoted club spending £1.5 million on a squad. We don’t just want the salary maximum scrapped or maybe raised by negotiation (it is already going up by £500,000 this year to almost £6 million) but a minimum salary cap of £4 million introduced too. I think three of our 12 clubs were below that last season when they were in survival mode.”
Worcester, London Irish, Sale and Newcastle have suffered double-digit percentage collapses in their attendances compared with 2009-10. Overall, the average attendance for a regular-season Premiership match, not including those played at Wembley, Twickenham and in the play-offs, is 10,537 this season compared to 11,141 in 2009-10.
The overall average crowd for all Premiership matches, including the 10 played at Twickenham and Wembley and in the play-offs, reached a record 13,674 in 2009-10. So far this season, the corresponding figure is 12,294.
“I do recognise some clubs say ‘it’s easy for Saracens to talk like that’,” said Griffiths. “But you get the feeling some clubs are more concerned about what each other are doing, than the collective good. It would be a terrible shame if through caution we missed a golden opportunity. The Premiership presents an outstanding spectacle at an outstanding price. We would be absolutely stupid to sit and do nothing while a league across the Channel is growing and growing.”
I'm betting now the last part is how they're getting around the salary cap. Chris Ashton is a mentor to some poor sap in Georgia.......Only Saracens, Harlequins, Wasps and Sale (once) have tried the big-stadium idea. “Let Newcastle play at St James’s Park, or Sale at Old Trafford, or Gloucester at the Millennium Stadium,” said Griffiths. “These matches put the league on the grand stage. And clubs need to put proper teams and marquee players into the Premiership’s Sevens competitions. Why can’t we play Premiership Sevens tournaments around the world? I’ve been to China and Brazil, and sevens is all they talk about.”
Saracens, backed by South African investors, have partner clubs in Moscow, Kuala Lumpur, Abu Dhabi, Nairobi, Sao Paulo and Tonga – with Seattle, Timisoara in Romania, and a club in Georgia to follow – who wear their kit and logo and share their community and coaching programmes. “We estimate we could have 40 Saracens players participating at the Rio Olympics under various national colours,” said Griffiths. “And we have an advertising campaign running worldwide on CNBC.”
Except for this.offshorerules wrote:Watched the match yesterday with an ardent, if misguided, munster fan. It was nice to be in total agreement about our delight with the result.
There would be an interesting "forensic accountancy" exercise there for someone who had the time and the knowledge.rooster wrote: The way Sarries are funded is a crazy mess of companies and at the end of the day they could walk away from the debt at any time with no financial loss which is a very dubious existence, they don't even have assets as the stadium is in a different company from the other debts.
Most of the top Irish players have one don't they? Articles pop up in the papers about them and the level of profits they have made from time to time. I seem to recall BOD Limited (can't remember its actual name!) was fairly raking it in last time they gave the details.mikerob wrote:The arrangement when a player sets up a company for off-the-field activities has been around for a long time. The player's company gets paid for things like image rights and promotional activities and there is a variety of ways this company can be made "tax efficient".
I don't think it is unusual for the top players who can get money from activities other than playing.Vamos los azules wrote:Most of the top Irish players have one don't they? Articles pop up in the papers about them and the level of profits they have made from time to time. I seem to recall BOD Limited (can't remember its actual name!) was fairly raking it in last time they gave the details.mikerob wrote:The arrangement when a player sets up a company for off-the-field activities has been around for a long time. The player's company gets paid for things like image rights and promotional activities and there is a variety of ways this company can be made "tax efficient".
