Long haul ahead for London Broncos to get back to golden age of 25 years ago

A quarter of a century ago, the future looked decidedly brighter for London Broncos.

Hot off the back of a second-place finish in Super League II, they sunk Canberra Raiders in front of almost 9,000 fans at The Stoop, and two years later reached their first Challenge Cup final at a sun-drenched Wembley, with a side featuring the likes of Shaun Edwards and Martin Offiah.

Backed by Richard Branson’s cash, it seemed the sky was the limit for a club that had struggled to assert itself in various previous guises prior to the sport’s summer revolution that appeared tailor-made to establish a top-flight force in the capital.

This weekend the Broncos travelled to Dewsbury entrenched into the Championship relegation zone, and facing the very real danger of a plunge into League One, with its prospect of games against the likes of Cornwall and their London neighbours, the Skolars, next season.

A hard-earned 18-26 victory – only their second in 15 Championship games this term – deflected the immediate danger for Mike Eccles’ side, enabling them to leapfrog their rivals out of the relegation zone.

Nevertheless, their current predicament hardly tallies with the stated ambition of the club’s long-term owner, David Hughes, who inherited it from Branson in 2002, to attract crowds of 5,000 within three years to their latest shared home at Plough Lane, where they moved at the start of this campaign.

Simultaneously, however, Hughes announced that the Broncos would become part-time and conceded that they faced a “transitional period”, which made their consequent struggles this season, all the more understandable.

Tulsen Tollett, who made over 100 appearances for the Broncos between 1996 and 2001 and played alongside Offiah and Edwards in the