NRL
Australia
National Rugby League (NRL) is the top league of professional rugby league football clubs in Australasia. The NRL competition (sometimes referred to as the Telstra Premiership for sponsorship purposes) is contested by 16 teams, 15 based in Australia and one based in New Zealand, and is the Southern Hemisphere's elite rugby league championship.
Canterbury Bulldogs vs Gold Coast Titans
Match scheduled:
Date: 18-06-2010
Time: 10:45 until 12:30
Round #15 - NRL Telstra Premiership 2010
Watch live rugby TV
The Gold Coast Titans are an Australian professional rugby league football club based on the Gold Coast in Queensland. They compete in Australasia's elite rugby league competition, the National Rugby League (NRL) premiership.
They are the newest of the sixteen clubs, having commenced their inaugural season on March 18, 2007. Since 2008, the Titans have played their home games out of Robina's Skilled Park.
The Titans are the second top-level rugby league club to have been based on the Gold Coast, the first being the ill-fated Gold Coast Giants/Seagulls/Chargers, which existed from 1988 to 1998. The re-introduction of a Gold Coast-based team since the Chargers were cut from the NRL competition at the close of the Super League war has been viewed as highly successful and the Titans' case is often used in arguments by those in favour of the re-expansion of Australasia's competition.
Contents[hide] |
[edit] History
Main article: Gold Coast Titans History
Also see: Gold Coast Giants/Seagulls/Chargers
[edit] Formation
The beginnings of a Gold Coast team's bid to return to the National Rugby League began when the Australian Rugby League decided to remove the financially successful Gold Coast Chargers from the National Rugby League at the end of the 1998 Season. The ARL wanted to have a second major team based in Brisbane and believed the best way to achieve this was by removing the Gold Coast team from the competition. The attempt to launch a second Brisbane team failed and in 1999, Michael Searle, former Gold Coast Chargers player and Managing Director of International Sports Australia, formed a Gold Coast Bid Team. The team included former Chargers boss Paul Broughton and was labelled as "The Gold Coast Consortium" by the media. The board were constantly active in lobbying the NRL to both expand the competition and consider the Gold Coast’s bid for inclusion. They were successful in organising pre-season NRL trial matches to be hosted on the Gold Coast and with average attendances of over 16,000, and peak attendances topping 20,000, the popularity of rugby league on the Coast was clear.
I firmly believe rugby league should be looking to expand. The Gold Coast area is growing at a phenomenal rate. There are 89 rugby league teams in Gold Coast primary schools and 59 teams in Gold Coast high schools representing about 2,300 young players. That's just schoolboys. If you take the catchment area from South Brisbane to Byron Bay in northern NSW, you are looking at a rugby league heartland starving for recognition. These areas would only blossom even more if the young players had a senior team in the NRL competition to which they could aspire. South-east Queensland needs another NRL team desperately and for a whole host of reasons.
– Phil Gould, 21 December 2003[1]
In August 2004, the NRL rejected Michael Searle's bid for re-adding a Gold Coast team.[2] However later, during an episode of Nine Network's The NRL Footy Show, the "Gold Coast Consortium" announced their team name and jersey to the public from the Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre. Initially the team was to be named the Gold Coast Dolphins, with the team colours to be white, jade and orange. While the Dolphins moniker was popular among many, the heavyweight Brisbane Queensland Cup side the Redcliffe Dolphins saw it as a threat for any prospect of entering the NRL they had, and as a result threatened severe legal action if the Gold Coast used the Dolphins name. Midway through that year the National Rugby League announced that after viewing submissions from the Gold Coast Dolphins, the Central Coast Bears and the Wellington Orcas, there would not be a 16th team included in the 2006 NRL competition. Reasons given to the Gold Coast was the National Rugby Leagues concern over the quality and capacity of their homeground, Carrara Stadium, which is an oval and only seats 16,000 (although it has been known to fit in 23,000 after minor redevelopment).
