JonM

One oddity of it being a Toronto home game and played on a Saturday evening is that Jon Wilkin gets to play/referee and serves his ban for the Leigh game next week instead. If it had been a Sunday game, he would have been banned for it, AIUI.

As NERugbyDad pointed out, Newcastle v Doncaster is on Our League. So you can watch that one for free. https://www.rugby-league.com/livestream

One thing that hasn't attracted much comment is that the government and the EU have managed to carve out little side-agreements to mitigate the worst of a no-deal without attracting the attention of the lunatics. Airlines have been given permission to keep flying existing routes, with 5 months to sort out ownership, safety standards, slots etc. Both sides have also agreed that people can carry on living where they live now, so British people living in the EU won't be told to get out and we won't be kicking out anyone with an EU passport.

Of course, some Brexiteers think this is a good thing. Their pet economist Patrick Minford thinks there should be no car manufacturing industry in the UK after Brexit and that the 850 000 people involved in it will retrain to do something else and that it will be a net gain for the country.

But, unlike May, he has spent over 45 years opposing and voting against the EU/EEC. His sidekick Seumas Milne has taken an even more anti- position over the years, as befits his decades in the Communist party. Much as I like to blame Gove, Johnson, Fox and the people who voted for them for our current predicament, the people who voted Corbyn in as Labour leader are every bit as culpable.

I may be wrong, but I think their ground was at St. Michaels in the Hamlet - bit further north than the cricket ground. I was watching county cricket at Aigburth around that time and I don't remember rugby being played there at all.

They'd survived as a top club for ~140 years with quite a lot of England internationals having played for them, but yes they probably had a reasonable idea what sort of place Liverpool was. Like I say, I don't know the ins and outs but I guess they were one of the many RU clubs that didn't survive the transition to professionalism.

Dunno - but I assume things were not going well for them as Liverpool. They were in division 1 for a year or two when RU first got a league structure in the 1980s. Not sure what happened to their old ground.

Going back to the RFC v FC thing - the original rugby union club in Liverpool, formed in 1857, was claimed to be the oldest "open" (i.e open to anyone rich enough to be a member) rugby club and was formed as Liverpool Football Club, not RFC. They were still considered a top club until the early 1980s and only merged with St. Helens RUFC in the 1990s.

Forgot to mention that the TO-Widnes attendance was given as 2189 and that former Widnes favourite Patrick Ah Van was there in the stands, he's now playing for Villegailhenc in Elite 2.

Yes. Pretty much a weekly occurence by the looks of it.

It was due to be the first game at the OLP, but the "beast from the east" meant it was postponed.

London Broncos game in early March. There was quite a lot of snow, IIRC.

I've found those to work a treat - and there's been several scientific studies backing it up too. Best to nip it in the bud before it turns into an injury. The achilles tendon is amazingly slow to heal if it does get a tear or something.

It was on the way back into the centre. My previous experience of tear gas was in Peru (police vs primary school teachers - mostly middle aged women) and this looked rather more serious so we didn't stick around to see what was happening, but from TV it looked like thousands of protestors and some people injured. I thought some Toulouse players looked rather wary of the pitch. They seemed to play rather better at the less swamplike end of the ground. Nice to see Stan Robin at the top of his game though.