I'm amazed the guy hasn't been sacked. Perhaps he's waiting to lead them to back to back wooden spoons so the Widnes board will have to pay out his contract?

Job for life

As you can see by our plummeting attendances us Widnes supporters are more than baffled how he is still in charge. He picks some strange sides, his interchanges are terrible, and we have zero tactics. We have the smallest pack ever in SL and he still tries to play up the middle. We struggle to make ground and he drops any player who dares to show a bit of flair.
Just hopeless :'(

Problem is, you have a bloke in charge who is more than happy with churning out this sh*t week after week. Rule gave us the Agar years so we know all about it. How the hell that bloke has a role at St George I'll never know!!

Agreed with what others have said. He's got a job for life.

Widnes seem to be a club just happy to be in SL. It's almost like they want to be a community club and funding a first team is an inconvenience. They want to take the money and put lads on I.T courses and then maybe look at the first team.

The work they do in the community is fantastic, but they are in our elite competition and that shouldn't take precedence over the first team. Widnes have some great young players coming through, but they are coming into a club that doesn't support it's first team, has completely lost a connection with the fans (which is now irreparable and i'm surprised the Widnes fans have had this much patience)

Having said all that, even if they sack Betts it won't solve all their problems, they have deeper issues that i've mentioned above. The attitude of those above Betts needs to change. Have some ambition!

Also agree with Karen about James Rule. How that man gets a job in our sport is anyones guess.

Sky reporting Betts is set to leave Widnes. So much for that 'job for life' eh?



Being replaced by Francis Cummins apparently

In all seriousness, I feel for Betts. Maybe he has his hands tied by management. He always looks stressed. However, he doesn't get the best out of the players he has. Some of the team selections are really weird. There virtually zero tactics shown by the team we have.

Clearly the show of force by fans last week worked. I've never seen them go after management so forwardly until last week where even the people in the South Stand were screaming at the CEO to go from a few rows away.

Edit: Now officially announced. Looks like he was pushed.

Looking at the Widnes squad and the complete lack of investment in it over the last decade what else does anyone expect, Craig Bellamy could go and coach there and I still doubt they would be top 8.

Good youth system at Widnes, but they are too reliant on it and for me don't have enough quality to complement the young players.

Wrong person gone IMO, for Widnes to move forward, Rule needs to be next

Why?

I understand most Widnes fans hate his approach to generating revenue. I personally think a lot of what he says makes sense:
1. Town is currently not providing the number of fans required to fund the chicken that will lay the egg and bring the fans back.
2. The town is limited in size so we could never get the number of fans some of the cities do.
3. You get a bigger return (commercial sponsorship) going after those parties than you do going after more fans.

People say "oh you need to fund the first team, focus on rugby, etc" but don't actually say how they expect him to pay for it to begin with.

He used to trot out the same old lines when at Hull, despite having crowds of 12k plus and one of the largest sponsors in the league at the time. We were seriously under funded from the coach up, although he's very good at the spin I'll give him that. He has no interest in building a strong team, but he'll keep talking the talk while the value on the pitch remains poor.

The problem is that Rule seems to be a "fix one thing and move onto the next". It rarely works like that.

Going after commercial partners makes sense, but what Rule is offering those commercial partners is access to an audience. If that audience is diminishing, then his sales approach gets weaker and weaker.

So he needs to increase that audience. The way to do this is to create something that people want to actually buy. Whether he's selling a "night out", a form of entertainment or enjoyable rugby, it's clear that is not what is currently on offer at Halton Stadium.

As for his "the town is too small" argument, he is allowed to promote the club outside of the city's postcode boundary.