Just Browny

It's always 'jam tomorrow' with Tonga and Samoa. We've beaten them easily in almost every meeting and would again.

Chuffing Wire, trying to buy the league, no youth products, always their year.

I think we are agreeing really. Trout is passable as a second rower and if someone got injured I'd be happy with him slotting in there. But if the plan is that we need to have a backrower on the bench to do 40 minutes in the backrow, I'd pick someone who is an out and out second rower to do that.

I'm happy with Trout but now think it can only be as a prop, not second row. His contribution on Saturday was short and forgettable: get him in the mix or don't bother. I'd have Watkins in and hope he could deliver a few offloads as he has all year for Leeds. If he does, back him up and give the Aussies a bit more to think about.

So you're saying Williams' 118m against Australia stacks up well against Lewis's 110m game average for the season (175m v Cas, 164m v Hudds, etc). It was 7 missed tackles for Lewis, 3 for Williams btw.

Fortunately, as well as any lateral running, he managed to progress 118m with the ball, compared to Lewis's 68m. If you want to run your 'Williams was a turnstile in defence' line again, I'll be happy to pull up the stats on that too.

Griff, please tell us you were involved in planning this fixture setup. There cant be any other reason you would bat so hard for a system that is clearly a bag of s**** and will be binned off after one season.

It was released from the hands forwards. It was one of those slingy passes with the outside hand that are incredibly hard to throw backwards. It was forward by all the measures.

A neat RFL solution would be to tell Midlands or Newcastle that they have to pay all travel costs in the hope one drops out.

I did the scroll-and-pass-back technique with my party of six on Saturday. Just about worked.

You've over-garnished your point with Parsley. He was runner up.

Until Saturday, McMeeken had an England record of W9, L1.

Agree although I was talking more about the pre-game / kick-off time. Where it did just feel quiet. There were definitely moments where the crowd were ready to get involved but England didnt deliver anything to make it happen.

No it was pretty flat, mostly as many people arrived quite late. It looked like I was going to post on the main tour thread about lots of seats having been shown as 'sold' which weren't. But in the 10 minutes either side of kick off all of the empty seats in the lower tier filled up.

Yep they probably have to travel there for a number of regular reasons. And to state the obvious France is a large country where people are more used to travelling long distances to go to places (not on an Australia scale but certainly more than in northern England).

The weird thing is I think there's barely a cat in hell's chance of building Albi into a Super League-equivalent club. I just pointed out that they do enjoy that advantage of being the sole club in an administrative district. But I've somehow attracted the forum's know-alls in telling me how wrong I was.

Thanks, I'm sure your knowledge of 'how sport works' is unparalleled.

There are a lot of people who seem to know what I would do. I'm not sure based on what though. As it happens, I would have wanted 12 in SL, 12 in the Championship and 11 in League One. It sounds like the sort of thing an all-game 'Strategic Review might conclude. I don't really know what a 'dead-end league' is, but it sounds like what we have had for decades.

That is clearly true. In that first 10-15 minutes, when we were going set-for-set with them, there cant have been more than 2 or 3 drives taken by forwards. That wasn't forwards shirking work; the team work were working to Wane's plan which meant the outside backs doing the donkey work in our own half.

'Major city' might be pushing it..?! What about Avignon? Slim pickings though.

There are plenty of towns and villages with a strong regional identity; I wouldn't imagine any are demanding a rugby league team.

You must mean number 6 surely

Not me, my knowledge only extends to Belgium and the rainy northern French places. The département has existed since 1790 though, so you'd hope people would be starting to come round to it. And you're quite right: some departments are like Liverpool where everyone has an affinity to the place, and others are more like Kirklees where people would be happy for a load of random people in other areas to decide how to use the council's resources.

That's a group of people with a white-hot track record of coming up with a good plan and sticking to it.

That's the point. Albi is the prefecture (=capital) of the Tarn département, so even though it is a modest town you could conceivably build a club with a Tarn identity which appealed to the 400k people who reside in that area. It would need a lot of cash to get it going though.