Archie Gordon

Some kind of media event at Wembley, late Wednesday afternoon. I have no other details. EDIT: Obviously, this is a good thing - I should have been more positive in my first post.

There's an event in London next week to mark 100 days to the first Test. I think they're sending Williams and Welsby down. I can't help feeling McMeeken and Nsemba should be the salesmen.

If you don't support a club, you can't complete the survey.

My view is that SL should be a comp where all games attract 8-25k attendances in the regular rounds. I'm not fixed on the number of clubs but if we only have, say, 8 that can deliver that we shouldn't be expanding to include new entrants. I have no club but it has got to the point now that I'll only watch the top end of the comp. Many of the games at the bottom end are a hard sell - we don't need more of these matches, Sky Sports surely don't either.

What an age to be alive! I've taken today off to do a bunch of DIY at home but am now watching East Campbelltown Eagles vs France u19s in HD! I remember when it took Rugby League Week magazine 2 weeks to make it to the UK. But not everything changes. I tuned in just in time to see Aussie officials rubbing out a decent France try.

I guess we'll see if the imports are average 2025 SL standard or not when Bradford, London and TO come in next year and finish ... well, 10th-14th, I imagine. It's not just a question of whether a new set of Qld Cuppers are better than UK trained squad fillers, it ought to be about whether the standard of the comp itself is raised. I can't see anything other than a decline.

Selling the Wembley Test in July with no marketing spend and no Eng or rep games as a taster is bound to see very slow sales. I'm not sure that anyone down here is much aware yet.

Origin trending on UK twitter/X once again. Impressive.

We touched on this earlier - and these numbers are unstable/unreliable from one year to the next - but, yes, better to be unsure about a rise than a decline.

Player registrations will tell their own story but (for the RFL anyway) they will be an underestimate. The survey estimates are important to SE because they are measuring all sports using the same methodology. Governing bodies have a vested interest in bigging up their playing numbers - this survey counters that.

No change is about statistical significance and means that the confidence intervals overlap. So, the actual estimate (75k vs 50k or whatever it is) can increase but if the margin of error is 15k then the intervals/margins overlap - hence the a lack of confidence that this isn't just down to sampling variation from one year to the next. Still, it is probably close to being statistically significant and the estimate is moving in the right direction which is better than the opposite. But statisticians wouldn't accept that we've seen an increase - indeed, the Active Lives folks don't.

Final column on Table 6a.

It's a sample survey undertaken by a professional organisation (Ipsos) so the result will be an estimate with a lower and upper bound within which the true number is expected to sit. Given the report of 'no statistical change', it's not clear to me that there has been any increase on last year, therefore.

And presumably we look forward to Aaron Bower (was it?) writing this up by tomorrow.

I think we've had this issue before - increases/decreases may be nothing of the sort as they may fall within the confidence interval around the point estimate.