paley

Sky were aware the RFU had split the GP up into two packages, they only bid for one of them so there is nothing to suggest they will be paying far more to get both packages next time. The 2 packages together cost more than the single one the previous time.

Or go to Chinatown in New York - some of the shops have buckets outside full of nameless denizens of the deep squirming away and often trying to escape across the pavement.

I have no beef with them training anybody - I just thought it a bit odd to have their training center at a school with no real interest in rugby league,

As far as I am aware the top 30 club rugby attendances of all time wouldn't include a single union match - yet which sport is claiming with a lot of success in the media that various of its games have broken the club rugby attendance record?

remind me...

Listening to some serbians tell you what happened when they managed to get back to their village after the croats had just left was also disturbing. I spent several months on a campsite in holland in the early 90s - there were quite a few serbs there, mostly deserters - nasty stories from all sides.

Don't be so daft, they would never use the word "rugby" - what would happen is there would be 2 names, Sydney Footy and Queensland Footy.

Which would be nice for the australians

where do you live?

The RFL have spent a lot of money wining and dining London based sports editors and writers and every single penny of that money has been a waste. The London media don't give a toss anout rugby league. Chris Irvine should have known the writing was on the wall when Stephen Jones used several of his many articles to laugh about rugby league being sidelined by his paper and becoming mostly an online afterthought - once the paywall went up even that afterthought wasn't worth persevering with. The problem will only get worse, there is no career to be had in rugby league journalism other than as a local reporter. Once what remains of the current crop of freelancers who get an occasional match report published nationally hang up their pens the other papers will just drop coverage other than to put some press wire stuff up occasionally, send some snooty, condescending ###### to a final every now and again or mobilise their brightest teams of investigative journalists if an aussie player forgets to tip a waiter.

On the last 2 occasions I have been to Cardiff for a game we have stayed in the St Davids - for about

They tried that with a london paper, they were told to sod off.

The most recent Sunday Times: lots of soccer, a couple of pages of cricket, an article about a south african bloke who runs on springs, big article on swimming, a page of golf, some tennis, big article about some woman who plays union - and a tiny bit of RL squeezed in the margin of the article about the union woman. Soccer isn't all the papers care about, they cover many sports - unfortunately it is generally the case that RL isn't one of them.

On their website it will be listed as Collingwood v Geelong and show a picture of Shane Warne

I agree, after most media outlets shamefully ignored him when he received an MBE it's good for the game itself to recognise the great work he has done. The fact is that rugby league is pretty much on its own so the game has to celebrate itself and its players

Good to hear

Zoe (my GF) has a profile article about her in the Halifax Courier today

I have just written a program to reproduce the Times rugby league coverage for a period of about 2 months at the beginning of this year. I have provided the source code below - it is platform agnostic so should run ok on whatever computer you have:

Would covering british rugby league in a british newspaper make sense too?

Irish union gets lots of coverage in the british version of The Times. Sky should promote some of its RL programmes - it doesn't even think RL is rugby but this has all been covered before.

It gets enough to keep it ticking over but it's not one of Sky's preferred sports so gets little promotion. The Times is one of Murdochs papers but it gave rugby league the minimum amount of coverage and has now decided even that was too much. Don't worry, irish union will still get a lot of coverage in a british paper.

The RFL are getting some money from Sky and that's about it, Sky do very well from the deal, RL gets marginalised and treated with contempt in the general media. I will occasionally buy the Times if I don't have internet access but I can't recall ever having made that purchasing decision because of its RL coverage.

I doubt anybody bought the Times for its rugby league coverage - it's coverage was miniscule at best with an occasional brief match report often in the sports round up section - it went 2 months at the beginning of the year with no mention of the sport at all. This won't lose the Times any readers - it won't lose them any of the handful of people who pay to peek behind the pay wall. It's just a great shame that national newspapers hold the sport in such contempt. News Ltd certainly seem keen to marginalise rugby league as much as possible.