Rugby league club crisis as players refuse to play amid ‘clashes with board’

A rugby league club have had yet another controversy just days after the resignation of their last head coach.

RFL Championship side Whitehaven have had an incredibly tough time of it recently.

Minutes after a tight victory over Doncaster at the weekend, then-head coach Jonty Gorley, in a post-match interview with BBC Radio Cumbria, announced that he was stepping down from his role.

He was already set to leave the club at the end of the year, but he said that he “just can’t stay at the club now” due to recent internal developments, which he didn’t specify.

The club are in well-documented financial difficulty, but they have confirmed that St Helens icon Kyle Amor is their new head coach, for his very first such role.

They announced in a statement on Monday: “Whitehaven Rugby League are delighted to announce that Kyle Amor has agreed to take over as head coach at the club with immediate effect for the remainder of the 2024 season.

“The 37 yr old TV broadcaster with Sky Sports is returning to his roots having played for whitehaven in 2009 and 2010.”

Rugby league club crisis as players refuse to play amid ‘clashes with board’

Now, things have got worse for Whitehaven, with – as reported by Yorkshire Live – the club’s players refusing to fulfill the club’s remaining fixtures in the current campaign, while Kyle Amor has revealed that he joined the club to find most of the backroom staff had departed.

He said, via the club’s Facebook page, “Things have materialised over the last 24 hours that had made a lot of the current people unable to work with the board here at Whitehaven.

“Unfortunately, by the time I got here, I’ve landed with no performance staff, no management staff, no managers.

“I’ve had a conversation with a group of players that are fully united – in terms of.. they will not play any remaining fixtures of this season for Whitehaven unless some really, really drastic measures and conversations can happen between them and the board.”