I’VE always had a slightly geeky side to my personality.

When I was a boy, for example, I used to thoroughly enjoy checking out the football and rugby league fixtures and then checking on my father’s road maps of the British Isles what the journeys would be for the away teams – which ‘A’ roads they would take, which towns and villages they would probably go through, how many miles they would cover and so on.

It was a strange hobby but it led to a lifelong love of maps and it gave me a very good knowledge of the geography of the British Isles, which would occasionally come in useful, not least when I was studying geography in school.

As time went on I extended my interest to maps of Australia and in particular to identifying the country locations, mainly in New South Wales and Queensland, that had rugby league teams, ranging from Mount Isa in the far north of Queensland (the town where Kristian Woolf, the former St Helens and now the Dolphins coach, originates from) to Wagga Wagga near the Victoria border in the southern part of New South Wales and Broken Hill near the South Australian border.

I was attracted by the names of Australian towns and cities, which ranged from the familiar names with English origins, like Newcastle, to names that were presumably derived from indigenous culture, such as Toowoomba and Wollongong.

I was an early subscriber to Rugby League Week, the late and much-lamented Australian weekly magazine, and I made it my business to find a map of Australia that was on a sufficient scale to allow me to locate all the country towns that participated in Country Rugby League.

Later on, when we studied the geography in Australia at grammar school, our teacher was amazed at my apparently pre-existing encyclopaedic knowledge of the country.

So being a geek definitely had its advantages.

I also developed a natural interest in fixture planning, which remains with me to this day.

I still enjoy looking at various football and rugby competitions, including the FA, the NFL, the AFL and the NRL, to see how they organise their fixtures and whether they are likely to optimise attendances and TV viewership.

For example, when it comes to Super League, I’m sometimes amazed to see how Thursday night fixtures are allocated.

Bearing in mind that televised matches on Thursday nights are the introduction to the weekend’s round of fixtures, while there is often no opposition from major football matches, it is surely important that any Super League match played on that night of the week should be highly competitive and played in front of a big crowd with plenty of atmosphere.

The obvious conclusion to draw, if those are our objectives, is that a game scheduled for a Thursday night should be a derby game in which the away team would have a big following to create the sort of atmosphere that will excite a decent TV audience.

And if we look at the 2026 Super League season, we’ll see that the first three Thursday night games satisfied those criteria. The opening game was York v Hull KR, which had a dramatic ending; the second game in round three was between Wigan and Leigh, which turned out with a one-sided 54-0 final score, although that couldn’t have been anticipated beforehand; and the third game in round four was between Wakefield and Hull FC.

Subsequently, however, we had games between Wigan and York, Hull FC and St Helens, Leigh and Huddersfield, York and Toulouse, Huddersfield and St Helens, Hull KR and Wigan, Leeds and St Helens, Warrington and Leeds, Warrington and Catalans, St Helens and Hull FC, Leeds and Leigh, and Wigan and Hull KR.

None of those games fit the criteria I outlined and most of them drew crowds that were lower than the crowds they would probably have drawn later in the weekend.

And when those games were being played, most weeks there were other fixtures that could have been allocated to Thursdays that would have had a derby element and big crowds.

My theory is that a closely-contested derby game shown on Thursday night in front of a big crowd is a great lead-in to the weekend’s other games and is likely to boost attendances overall.

So I’ll be watching with interest when the fixture list is revealed for the 2027 season, whenever that happens.

First published in Rugby League World magazine, Issue 525 (October 2026)