Bradford Dudley Hill have been relegated from Division One of the National Conference League for failing to fulfil a fixture.

The Parry Laners could not raise a team for the home match against Rochdale Mayfield on Saturday, October 12, when the winter season was in full flow.

Dudley Hill have also been fined £500 and deducted two league points, which did not affect their finishing position of seventh out of 13 teams.

Club secretary Andy Harland said: “The sanction is pretty severe but we will just have to accept it and we won’t be appealing.

“It was just down to a lack of numbers. We weren’t going to get into the end-of-season play-offs and we weren’t going to be relegated and therefore didn’t have anything to play for.

“We managed to raise 12 players for the match but two or three of them were juniors and it wouldn’t have been right on health and safety grounds.”

Yet Harland feels that both the league and Dudley Hill themselves can learn lessons from the 2013 season.

“Because of our safe situation, we had 47 open-age players – which is a huge number – leave us before the end of the summer season to play in the Pennine League,” he said.

“They felt that somebody else would cover for them as far as Dudley Hill were concerned.

“But the same situation won’t arise next season as we will be selecting from players who have more loyalty to us.

“The league could also learn something. There is about a three or four-week overlap with the winter season at the start of our season and a seven-week overlap at the end.

“If the league had scheduled fixtures for every week, the situation we found ourselves in wouldn’t have occurred. We need to play week-in, week-out.”

Harland added: “Rugby league is struggling in general for players at the moment and people don’t like change, but the move to summer was still the right one.

“In the Pennine League, players might go for a month without a fixture because of the Christmas break and the weather.”