So the mid table Banbury Badmen cancelled their game last week against the undefeated Towcester Burners. The chairman seemed so sincere when he informed the league and anyone who would listen on a Facebook group, that player safety was the reason for the cancellation. Also they’d love to reschedule against the Burners but there just won’t be time. It’s a real shame. I feel for them, so tough having all those problems the same week as the big game. The confusing thing is the following week the Banbury Badmen beat bottom of the table Stratford Shakespeares. Their Facebook and Twitter pages were deathly quiet the last 4 weeks while they were in a losing rut suddenly burst into life with pictures of Badmen players doing football related stuff. Maybe a Defensive Lineman looking angry laying on a Running Back accompanied by the caption “Badmen lineman Dave Bignuts shuts down another RB.” Looking further down the page there’s a photo of a Wide Receiver and a coach mid-air bumping shoulders with the caption “Star WR Mike Gluehands pulls in yet another TD.” You look at that and think to yourself the kid is wasted playing for Banbury and should be in the GB squad. It’s just his knee is playing up and you know…. He has stuff on when the trials were held. Knee looked fine scoring that TD and celebrating though.
Some of you will be laughing at the above story, others will have no idea what I’m about. What I aim to address here is an issue we see often, the ability for teams to field a team one week and forfeit the next as though it’s no biggy. In some cases teams drop out halfway through the year and forfeit the rest of their games. It is something we see weekly in BUAFL but it isn’t just limited to the students. Nottingham cancelled against EKP, the #1 team in the Premiership North, a tough game in which they were the favourites to take a lot of kick returns. Yet a week later they had 28 players kitted in a beat down over a weak 19 player West Coast Trojans. I’m not going to go into the ins and outs of Nottingham’s forfeit but a decision was taken by Nottingham’s Head Coach Barry Boseley after consulting the players to forfeit EKP and get ready for WCT. They come back to win but still conceded 14 points against 19 guys who were on a 570 odd mile round trip. Now that number of 570 miles might be inaccurate. I went onto the BAFANL website and followed the link to the West Coast Trojans website to lookup their home ground to research their mileage to Nottingham. But all I found was website with 4 images on it, 3 of them sponsors and the 4th declaring them 2012 champions of somewhere. The only link was to a news page with the date of Jan 2013. This in itself is a whole new article but let’s get back to this one first.
West Coast are also guilty of forfeiting games this season, having skipped two after only playing three games. “But we were promoted to the premiership when we weren’t ready” will be the cry. A quick peek at their fixtures though will tell you that apart from the game against East Kilbride, a game where they showed up with an already small squad of 25 kitted guys, they have faced opponents that they would have faced in the old division one. So why the sudden loss of players and confidence in fulfilling fixtures? Only the West Coast Trojans will know. But it leaves us speculating whether they are flat track bullies that only like to compete when they know they are in with a greater chance of winning, or maybe their roster management been so poor that they don’t have sufficient players to complete a full season of fixtures spread over 5-6 months?
Now there let me say there is a big difference over what you can control and what you can’t. The London Warriors had an incident with their ambulance not turning up, but that is different to not having enough players. I think there should be some straight up no budging ground rules. If you don’t have enough players to even kickoff then you have serious organisational issues that need time to fix. Why not force teams that forfeit games due to a small players roster (or “player safety”) into association until they can prove their organisation has improved enough to re-enter the league and take part in a full season? It will improve the sport in the long run to do this as it forces teams to recruit and train properly, focus on real player development and roster management and make them accountable for this by taking the privileged of playing away from them if they can’t match up to it.. Teams going from Premiership to national after forfeiting games is a cop out. As we’ve already mentioned there is a slight feeling of the “flat track bullies” about a number of teams losing players because they are losing games, so demoting them isn’t a punishment. Also if they were so short of guys they were missing games, the likelihood is that they were a bad team and earmarked for relegation anyway. Where is the punishment in giving them what they were going to get already?
There is already a fine system in place for teams and BAFANL should ensure this is vigorously enforced. Fine the teams. If they don’t pay they get sanctioned until they do. If fined the team should be suspended from play until it’s paid. If they don’t ever pay then they aren’t ever reinstated. It sounds harsh but where else in our society are you fined for something then it just forgotten about?
The biggest factor in this is that there is nothing serious in place to make people fulfill their fixtures. At the moment if guys don’t fancy playing a game for whatever reason then they don’t and then get relegated down to a division. I think it boils down to people needing to grow a pair and get it done, or realising that you may be winning battles but winning the war and taking it back to square one. Once in a while we all take a beating on the field. Losing is part of the game, avoiding losing by making sure you are elsewhere when it happens just makes you a coward. It’s a tough sport and nobody enjoys getting their ass kicked by a bigger stronger player, but by forfeiting the match you are harming the sport and kidding yourself. I’m not saying you should force your guys onto the field and compromise player safety but it is an excuse often used, yet rarely genuine.
Tomorrow we’ll take a look at some of the reasons behind forfeits and explore some ways of avoiding them. Hopefully the community can come together and put forward more plans to support ailing clubs. IF you’re a player that has been part of a team forfeiting, please contact us through dblcoverage@hotmail.co.uk to tell us why you think your team forfeited, or why you didn’t attend a game (be it injury or any other reasons).