Archie Gordon

Shaun Wane is currently belting out GSTK whilst walking up and down the line of players watching to see who sobs the hardest whilst clutching their shirt just above the heart. The best 13 start. I'll let you know the outcome.

I'd happily adopt any team that was playing within 100 miles of me. Sadly, someone's arranged a comp with just one game in that space. Anyway, FRA and PNG will be my TV teams.

I think that calculating a coefficient for a club rather than just putting them in a category is fundamentally flawed and will lead to a completely unnecessary focus on small annual changes in the ranking of B clubs and probably also cause problems in the perceived fairness of - if/when it happens - the elevation of a B club into an A. Categories, yes; coefficients, no.

I haven't understood Parra's kicking game. They need to find the ground with their kicks.

True. Not sure the ref has come onto the field yet.

"Pardon our interruption"

His apology made no sense. I therefore don't see how anyone could accept it.

It sounds like you want to, though.

This is very good but it really is the kind of thing the RFL/SL ought to have been able to put together without IMG input. From what you say about Welsh football, clubs either meet or fail to meet these standards. For our B clubs, the IMG/RFL plan seems to be to quantify each measure and then weight each score to produce a coefficient. That way madness lies IMO. I would be so much happier with B clubs being lumped together and performance on the pitch being decisive within that group - which is what seems to be the case with Welsh football.

It's a good squad. Pleased to see two London products in it.

Whilst the 2-leg CC proposal is just an idea, I don't think it's a leap to suggest that IMG's priors are that almost everything should revolve around the A clubs.

So have I. It doesn't quite mean what I thought! I probably meant procrastinated.

I'm way more optimistic. Quite a few union and football parents I talk to both know about it and have bought tickets. Big games in London get big crowds (generally) and I agree that one other would have been sensible and profitable. I wouldn't have gone for England necessarily - Australia or NZ QF would have been brilliant. As noted above, some blocks at the Emirates have no tickets left and I am pretty sure this is because they've sold out because I'vd previously looked into buying seats in those areas but prevaricated. Other areas where I tried to buy 4 tickets didn't have 4 together.

When I bought my tickets a few weeks ago, the Emirates had quite a few blocks sold out already. The organisers are missing a trick in not blacking out the sold out areas on the maps to indicate scarcity visually.

This is exactly right. But can you imagine just how complex calculating these weights/ratios will be? IMG don't even understand that you need to weight survey responses. Are you trusting that serious quants modellers and statisticians will be brought in to do the job? On the evidence so far, I'm not.