Leyther_Matt

Not televised but is live in OuRLeague. The RFL/England social media seem to be very keen at pointing this out, possibly more so than actually encouraging people to turn up to watch...

I would say it’s only in the last 2-3 seasons that games are being stopped so often to treat on-field injuries. Amazing how often it happens when a defence might have been faced with a sustained period of pressure. Just as there’s a proven link between players suffering from cramp when their team concedes a drop out.

And they wouldn’t be here today if they hadn’t been able to clear their debts with the sale of Central Park. Along with virtually every other club who sold off the family silver in the 90s.

The easiest thing to improve Odsal would be to ignore the existing bowl and build an entirely new stadium within the crater.

I don't think we can be too precious about the drunkeness at such fixtures on one hand and then be crying out for the Hearn's to be involved on the other. Your average darts event makes the Grand Final positively teetotal. For what it's worth, I didn't have any intention of going last night but happened to be going to the Imperial War Museum in the afternoon with my son and my other half and was pleasantly surprised to see how many families and the like were visiting the museum before going to the game, and at that point both myself and my Mrs commented that we'd rather wished we were going to the game after all. Then we walked through the Lowry back to the car and it already looked to be getting a little lively with folk drinking in the main communal area nearer the theatre even at 3-4pm and then figured it might have been for the best that we weren't going to the game after all (with t'lad in tow, at least).

Did you make it, Dave? Been a good few occasions when I’ve been in the same boat travelling in the opposite direction. Although yours was a far more pressing occasion than when it took me over 6 hours to travel by train from Wigan to watch Hibs for 50 minutes away to Cowdenbeath.

Best of luck. If you get the bloke doing the catering that does it at Goole AFC games then you’re on to a winner!

Don't they tend to play in conferences that are a little more time zone-friendly though? When I was in Toronto for the Leigh game, we watched the Blue Jays play away to Houston (3,000 mile round trip!) on TV in the pub on the Wednesday night and then watched them in the flesh at home to Detroit on the Friday night!

Rogers Centre has turnstiles similar to the one in your picture. I’m pretty sure BMO Field had them as well, though admittedly I was hungover from the Wolfpack-Leigh game the previous evening so could be wrong. Lamport just had entrance gates. It’s fairly common for RU grounds over here to just have a table set up at the gate (Ealing springs to mind when I’ve been to Broncos-Leigh games) but literally every other ground that hosts pro RL in this country has proper turnstiles and indeed having turnstiles is part of the ground grading in football right down to the bottom levels of the pyramid.

It’s not that they never attend a game, it won’t be the same 12,000 not turning up. In relating it to RL, I would confidently say that anything between 20% as high as 40% of season tickets would be unused for any given Super 8s game.

Worth noting that in recent years a significant number of FA Cup First Round games get played on the Sunday to allow the BBC to do a ‘highlights as they happen’ edition of Final Score throughout the afternoon, something that they can’t do on a Saturday because of broadcasting rules.

Blagnac would be perfectly adequate for most SL games I would suspect, the two stands are of a very decent size with plenty of standing room besides. The transport links are much better than they were when they first played there in the Championship 9 years ago with the city centre-airport tram link running nearby and plenty of buses from close to the centre of the Earth aka The Melting Pot. Obviously the Catalans game would be one to host at Wallon although as above there’s no reason why 19,000 should really be considered too big if they were to have any ambition about things, and there’s no reason to think it would be a problem given the number of RL games hosted there in the recent past.

In true RL fashion we’re retreating to the M62 and watching Atherton Colls at Mossley. Assuming that doesn’t get moved as well!

Exactly our plan. Had a minibus full bound for Anfield but when the game got moved we booked train tickets to Birmingham to go to the Aston Villa vs Bolton game. And then Sky today have moved it to the Friday night. Just my luck.

Can’t help getting the feeling of deja vu thinking back to the days of the Russian clubs being involved. Or indeed the French clubs that used to enter other than those already in our ‘system’. Would expect that they can only be drawn away from home and would enter with the amateurs initially as I don’t think anyone can have a realistic idea of their playing strength. Hopefully they will be more competitive than the Russians were - I saw them 3 times against Leigh and although they really did try their hearts out, they got stuffed heavily each time.