JonM

Yes, I'm absolutely sure if they were training full-time and had access to the range of stuff modern players do, every one of them would be a top player today. But the point is that things have moved on over forty years, and even at amateur level you'd expect players to be hitting the gym pretty seriously, games get videoed for later review and so on. No professional club has one bloke sat in the dugout who makes all the signings and who goes and shouts at the players at half-time. And that's the same in football, rugby union, cricket etc too. Even Doug Laughton who is being held up as the example here had a Widnes club committee which contained some ex-players (and coaches) - people like Harry Dawson, Vinty Karalius & Frank Myler. He also had a chairman who negotiated contracts with players and part-time specialist coaches e.g. Bill Hartley was sprint coach for Widnes before Maurice Lindsay persuaded him to move to Wigan.

Been looking at the coast to coast route this week and thinking Someone I know ran the coast to coast last weekend, as part of an organised race. She did it in just under 100 hours, the winner finished inside 48 hours. There was a 71 year old who completed the race last year, but I reckon I probably shouldn't wait that long. I did all 30 'mountains' in the Yorkshire Dales National Park last year. Haven't counted up the Wainwrights done in the Lakes, but I'd guess it's probably only 20 or so.

Also on the newspaper websites of Midi Libre, L’indépendant et La Dépêche du Midi, wonder if they're also geoblocked?

It really had nothing whatsoever to do with where Widnes ended up. We were a members' club at the time Dougie was coach, so there was really no option to go deep into debt because the elected committee members would've been personally responsible for it. Dougie's spending habits simply resulted in us having to panic sell players in the mid-nineties in order to fund stadium improvements. The collapse 20 or so years later followed on from the club being one of several professional sports clubs being used for VAT fraud/ money laundering, nothing to do with the relatively small sums people like Martin Offiah or Jonathan Davies were being paid. What has of course massively changed since those days is that players and coaches are full-time, and training doesn't consist of a few laps of the pitch and then off to the pub. I loved watching the Widnes team of the 1980s, but today's championship team would thrash them. Neither Offiah nor Davies did any weight training prior to joining Widnes.

There's a 4-day circular walk which passes through part of my garden, the Herriot Way. April/May and September/October seem to be peak season for long-distance walkers. Some days I count 30+ people stood outside the front of the house over the course of a morning consulting their guidebook, maps or phone. Sometimes I take pity on them and point out the footpath when they've been stood there for a while looking lost, although I worry that if you can't follow the instructions or read the map, better to find out in a village with accommodation, food and transport rather than up on the fells We get a couple of those 'sherpa' services operating round here, which carry your stuff from your B&B in one place to the next when doing long-distance walks, much easier than lugging a tent everywhere. Walkers tend to be almost always middle-aged men on their own, retired couples, or groups of women. Men don't walk in groups and I think younger men probably like to do something more challenging than this particular walk. Couple of memorable walks for me were a week long trek in the Andes in Peru, amazing to see people living and farming at 5000 metres altitude. Also walking across the Isle of Man on the Millennium Way from Ramsey to Castletown - not amazingly wild or scenic or difficult or anything like that and only 2 easy days, but for some reason it's stuck in my mind more than the coast to coast, south downs way, peddars way/norfolk coastal path or some of the other walks I've done in England. I've made a start on doing the Settle-Carlisle railway this year. The plan is to drive from home to a station, park there, take the train one or two stations down the line, then run/ walk back to the car. It's just short of 100 miles, so the plan is to do it over 6 separate days, not as one continuous thing.

Heads were so big that they couldn't run through gaps in the opposition defence without damage to their ears?

And yet, go to India, you'll see cricket being played on any surface. As a kid, we used to play RL on the concrete school playground, with a tin can for a ball, or even someone's pump nicked out of their PE bag. You were pretty motivated not to get caught in possession - and perhaps an explanation of why my primary school produced 3 halfbacks who played for GB in the 1980s-1990s.

I tend to run rather than walk, but I've done quite a few of the UK's long-distance paths, and the Hebridean Way is definitely my favourite so far. Some of the best shorter walks you really have to pick your time - the experience of say Malham Cove & Janet's Foss, or Dovedale in the Peak District would be rather different on a sunny summer bank holiday weekend...

I wonder how easy/ difficult it would be for someone to preserve these programmes for posterity by scanning them. Suspect it would be a massive undertaking to do this manually, but I assume there must be devices which can turn the pages automatically, as large quantities of books have been scanned this way?

Did York win on aggregate across the two legs?

12 207 was the announced figure.

It was widely stated as being a sell-out, so I'm not quite sure why the figure was several thousand down on capacity.

Canberra v Gold Coast 11 738 Wests v St. George 17 141 Parramatta v N. Queensland 14 443 NZ Warriors v Manly 23 076 Widnes v Halifax 2 558 Saints v Warrington 11 280 Castleford v Wigan 4097

Quite the turnaround from 4-14 at half-time to finish 40-14, but I thought we were on top even in the first half in spite of a bit of a lack of speed and intensity, just that we bombed a couple of tries and some great cover defence from Fax at times, whereas Halifax had three chances to score and took them all, with a couple of poor pieces of goal-line defence. Some brilliant passages of play from Widnes to get three tries in a bit over five minutes at the start of the second half, but we did get a couple of lucky bounces of the ball on kicks that led to tries and then Halifax fell apart a bit, and of course they started trying a bit too hard to catch up which led to more tries. Owens was obviously our best player, his lack of pace is deceptive .

Cracking first half that.