John Drake

Here's the TRL rule on discussing the Las Vegas event, to avoid this place becoming a political soapbox. If you want to talk about the rugby league games being played there, fine, do that in this thread, and this thread only. If you want to discuss anything pertaining to the political situation in the USA and how it may or may not relate to the rugby league games being played in Las Vegas, do so in the political sub-forum, or your posts will be deleted and you may end up getting banned from the forums altogether. Thanks.

All the Las Vegas stuff has been removed from this thread. Here's the TRL rule on discussing the Las Vegas event, to avoid this place becoming a political soapbox. If you want to talk about the rugby league games being played there, fine, do that in this section of the forum, though not in this thread. If you want to discuss anything pertaining to the political situation in the USA and how it may or may not relate to the rugby league games being played in Las Vegas, do so in the political sub-forum, or your posts will be deleted and you may end up getting banned from the forums altogether. Thanks. Now, back to attendances...

I received a few reports/complaints about threads popping up in the RL forum that were primarily about other sports, this being one of them, so I punted them all into cross-code as they were, well, not unrelated to rugby league, but not about rugby league, if you see what I mean? Anyways, it just goes to show, you can't please all the people all the time. I've now put this one in AOB/AOS, as requested.

Locked.

Ahem. Just to remind everyone what this thread is supposed to be about...

Doesn't look like it. I'm locking this thread now as it has driftred way off topic. We'll be posting match threads up for the remaining rounds of the Challenge Cup in 2026 so the actual games can be discussed in those as and when. If anyone wants to discuss the structure of it, the promotion of it, or any other aspects relating to it, please feel free to start a new thread. Thanks

I have strategically decided to merge the 'Strategic Review' and 'Abi Ekoku' threads as for the last few pages of each they have essentially been discussing the same things.

A lot of people still refer to League Express as the Rugby Leaguer, though its 'proper' name is... Rugby Leaguer & League Express. And Rugby League World is still often confused with Open Rugby even though the title was changed last century (1999). We're not bothered what you call 'em, as long as you're buying 'em!

Just to clarify, anyone using any part of this forum, public or private, to make any kind of threat aimed at others will be permanently banned.

This unloved Disney era spin-off is turning out to be pretty good. The scenes in the diving contraption were very claustrophobic and effective. I think the cliffhangers, especially the end of episode 3, would have been even more powerful if they'd stripped these episodes across 5 consecutive nights and made us wait a bit for the resolution, instead of 2-2-1. Looking forward to seeing how it all gets wrapped up on Sunday. I'm hoping the Tardis materialises just before the closing credits... the Doctor steps out and says "Did you miss me?"

I enjoyed watching the re-edited version of The Sea Devils on BBC Four, followed by the first two episodes of The War Between the Land and the Sea on BBC One on Sunday night. Seems to have done ok in the ratings up against the final of I'm a Celeb, and generally avoided the kind of vitriolic criticism aimed at Doctor Who itself these days. I'd call that a 'win' after all the doom and gloom surrounding the Disney Plus era of the show.

No one is preventing someone local from setting up a rival to the Hastings Observer, that will employ brilliant investigative journalists to cover local issues, other than the fact not enough people will pay to read it to make it viable and it'll quickly go out of business (which will be why the original one was sold off to the group who stripped it of anything worth paying for). Go on, give it a go and see how long it lasts if is as easy as you suggest. I wish things were different, I honestly do, personally I loathe the clickbait world we live in now, but the internet and the availability of 'free content' (factual or otherwise, who knows) has completely pulled the rug from under the kind of world we might all prefer to live in. How do you uninvent it? You can't. So how do you generate revenue to pay wages of the people you want to create the quality content? Answers on a postcard, please, to anyone in the publishing industry. Similarly, when ITV is shortly subsumed into Sky TV, people will scratch their heads and wonder why it happened, but the reality is their audiences have collapsed and ad revenue along with it, because people don't watch linear broadcast TV anymore and if they do, they skip through all the ads that pay for the programmes to be made or scream blue murder about paying a licence fee to keep the BBC going. 'Free' stuff comes at a very heavy cost.

Ahem... this, obviously. https://www.totalrl.com/product/rugby-league-yearbook-2025-26/

Must be the off-season.

Q: Why is there no brilliant investigative journalism these days like there was in the past...? A: People don't want to pay to read or watch it, and it doesn't come for free. Good luck squaring that circle.