gingerjon

She is the Queen of England. The title of Queen of Britain doesn’t exist.

I have to mute most of them when the Six Nations rolls round because, frankly, that many updates on exactly how great Wales are and England aren't in a tournament I have no interest in gets very dull very quickly. So, it's more an observation that they will passionately - genuinely so - support Wales against England in everything else but then have absolutely no issue supporting a team that is called England, acknowledges only the cross of St George and does absolutely nothing to indicate that it is actually meant to be the Welsh national team as well.

We have the data from a couple of decades and more of Super League on Sky that says there really doesn't seem to be any link between television viewing figures and whether Bradford, London, Sheffield or Halifax are in Super League.

They may have already left the T20 World Cup but PNG clearly had the best kit, including a cap for the ages:

Why?

There is truth in your words

By and large because the earliest 'internationals' were seen less as national contests and more between as challenges between associations.

Do you think many people who take the time to register and post on a rugby league board have never been to a rugby league game?

Agree with this. Rugby league players at the highest level get paid peanuts. It might be a lot relative to the average wage in their immediate locality but it's low compared to what they could earn if they'd chosen literally any other professional sport. The clubs will pay players to win games because that's what they're there to do. I don't like their self-interest but it would be madness to expect them to behave any other way. The failure of rugby league is down to a continued inability to create anything that isn't dependent on those same self interested clubs.

At some point, "whole game solution" fans will realise that both numbers are a lot smaller than the 30+ clubs we have in the system now.

I forget this more often than I remember it but it's worth understanding that the overwhelming majority of people outside of the north have no real concept of where places there are. Most aren't going to know that Wakefield and Castleford are near each other or that Leigh is just a small bit of Wigan. They will, because stereotypes, know that rugby league is northern but they won't get just how compact its part of the north is.

Given that rugby league instituted none of the plans from the time and invested £0 in sustainable development then it's not surprising that 25 years on the same arguments about the same issues come around.

As I know you know, technically the team is the team of the England & Wales Cricket Board. But the England & Wales Cricket Board is abbreviated to ECB, their team is called England and they walk out to Jerusalem. I find the number of Welsh cricket fans who have no problem with this (all of them, I've never met one opposed) to be absolutely baffling.

Scotland qualified for the main stage of the T20 World Cup yesterday. Superb win over Oman. Live on Sky. Ireland play later today. Wales' lack of a team is just weird.

It depends. England cricket fans would like to smash the Aussies every time we play them. We do not want the same when we play Ireland, Scotland or the Netherlands. (It could, by the way, be possible by the middle of next summer that the last time we played each of those teams, they won. It would need the Dutch to win the last game of the upcoming three match series for that to work.)