01/04/08 Do you fancy seeing the likes of London United, Birmingham Bullets, Brighton Bears, London Towers, Thames Valley Tigers, London Leopards, Manchester Giants, Derby Storm, Crystal Palace and Doncaster Panthers playing in the BBL again? Well, according to a mis-directed e-mail that has fallen into the wrong hands (ours), that day could be upon us very soon. Apparently plans are well advanced to revive the last ten clubs to withdraw from the BBL, to add to the continued natural expansion of that competition. It would clearly be a huge step for these teams to step straight into the intense competition of the BBL itself, and so the plan appears to be that, for the first season, they would play in an "Associate Feeder League" of their own. There would then be the prospect of promotion to the full BBL for the most successful members of the A F League. According to the leaked document, the driving idea behind this audacious plan is the realisation that there is, apparently, a large potential fan-base which seems to have been lost with the demise, over the past decade, of some of the most famous names in the competition. With basketball growing in popularity, and with the prospect that it may receive a further boost with the 2012 Olympics, the time is deemed to be right to encourage those lost fans back into the game. Exhaustive research (well, one phone call, anyway) has revealed that the A F League plans are very close to fruition. "It was easy to approach some clubs, such as three of the London teams, as versions of them are still running" we were told when we contacted the BBL. "The others have proved rather more problematic, as they went completely out of business. However, with a lot of hard work we've managed to trace people who were close to the administration of those teams and have been working together with them to re-establish their infrastructure. "There are obviously still a few problems to overcome. For instance, both Towers and Palace would want to play at the National Sports Centre at Crystal Palace, but we reckon that if ground-sharing is good enough for AC Milan and Inter Milan in Italian football, it should work here in basketball." Suddenly, though, our source realised who it was on the other end of the phone. "Look" he said, "we're really not ready to go public on this yet. We were hoping for a big launch at the Championship Weekend in a month's time. Could you keep it to yourself for a while? We really didn't want it to be public knowledge as early as April first" What, and miss out on a story like this? What sort of fool would that make me?
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