JonM

1. Will any player score a point or more against their former club in the Challenge Cup semi-final between Hull KR and Catalans? NO 2. Will Oldham finish the weekend higher than Toulouse in the Championship table following the match between the two? NO 3. Will Keighley get their first point on the League 1 table in their match against Workington? NO 4. Will the Challenge Cup semi-final between Warrington and Leigh in St Helens draw a larger crowd than the semi-final at the same venue last year? YES 5. Jayden Hatton (Featherstone) and Rhys Williams (Widnes) have both scored 9 tries this season. Will Hatton have scored more than Williams for the season after their teams meet on Sunday? NO Tiebreaker - How many points will be scored by all four teams combined across the two Challenge Cup semi-finals in total. 84

I didn't know that, but google says you're right, he did And referring to the original post, what I find impressive is that watching Dewsbury v Widnes last season, as a Widnes fan I was still nervous when he got the ball. He's not quite as fast, not quite as strong, but still a great player.

Aaron Wood (no relation to Aaron Woods, the ex Kangaroo or Aaron Wood who played for York and Donny) played his last game a couple of weeks ago for Pamiers in France, also in his forties. He's moved around even more than Paul Sykes though. He played Jersey Flegg with St. George, then three reserve grade Premier League wins with Parramatta (2005-2007, alongside Jarryd Hayne, Henry Perenara), then multiple French league and cup wins with Limoux, Toulouse, Avignon), player-coached at West Wales, played internationally for France.

They're the title sponsor for the Ashes series. Although I suspect the same problem of there being existing relationships at Wembley and Bramley-Moore will also arise.

It's not clear who those clubs are though. None of the club chairmen AFAICT has openly said anything about removing Catalans, for example. I'm sure there's no smoke without a fire, but still, who did it?

Or the Warren Buffett quote: "When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact." Or perhaps the one attributed to both Peter Lynch and Warren Buffett - "Go for a business that any idiot can run – because sooner or later an idiot probably is going to be running it."

If they're serious about it being NRL Europe, would be very interesting to try to get Nick Politis looking at what could be done in Greece. I know he's been funding the national team to some extent already.

It's 50% inaccurate clickbait and a waste of everyone's time to bother analysing it. See Worzel's comment about chess and pigeons above. Over the past few weeks I've gone from thinking NRL involvement would be fantastic to thinking these people are absolutely clueless and it'll be a disaster. Hopefully V'Landys, Abdo, Politis etc. are rather better informed about business reality than Aussie journalists and players appear to be.

If the reported AUD$650K salary is true, his agent might be advising him to sit tight for a while...

The Erasmus+Sport programme that they got money from previously ran from 2014-2020. It's a sensible move to be inside the EU to be eligible for funding, but it's not the case that they will necessarily get anything in the next round - looks like only about one in seven proposals were actually successful.

It's inspired me to have a go myself. The M62 is a 172km long motorway which runs through the northwest of England and Yorkshire. These two regions have a total population of 13 million, about the same as New South Wales and Queensland combined. As recently as thirty years ago, several hundred people were employed in the textile industry in this area. As recently as ten years ago, hundreds of people were employed in the coal mining industry. A fishing trawler still operates out of Hull with 30 crew on board. The region includes some of the world's largest soccer clubs, The Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City and many smaller clubs such as The Everton and The Leeds United. It is also the heartland of English rugby league.

I mean, to pick a sentence (and this is by no means the worst). "It runs from the Liverpool in the West to Hull in the East and every Super League but the French based Catalans Dragons sit within throwing distance of the M62." If she can't be bothered to do the most rudimentary stuff like reading through what's being published, let alone do some actual fact checking, then I'm going to file her with Gledhill in the 'waste of time even looking' category.

So I could submit an article along the lines of 'Rugby League in Australia has struggled to expand outside its heartland of the penal colony of Sydney. A handful of inner city clubs have repeatedly blocked attempts to merge them or to admit clubs from other cities'? Insert a few spelling and grammar mistakes and it's a 'very balanced' article?

Poorly written nonsense. She could have at least got someone to proofread it and correct the glaring grammar mistakes.

Comedy stuff - could have been written by an AI, although these days you'd expect an AI to at least get the grammar correct. https://www.theroar.com.au/2025/05/06/nrls-plan-to-take-over-horrendous-super-league-worth-a-look-but-englands-northerners-dont-like-change/

No. There's been low level teams that have come and gone in the past but not recently. It's been used as a venue for finals for many years - convenient neutral venue between Toulouse/ Albi/ Carcassonne/ Aude and Perpignan.

The old greyhound stadium where New Hunslet played is now the site of the Police HQ on Elland Road. I was always told that Parkside was where the industrial estate now is, on Parkside Lane, a few hundred metres from the current ground, but presumably a local could confirm.

Narbonne, although you will struggle to find any official mention of that anywhere. French RL seems to operate on a 'need to know' basis.

Looks like Wasps RU are going to try and find out. Again though, Kent Invicta would be a great example of how not to do things.

1. Which day of Magic Weekend will have the most points scored? Saturday 125 vs Sunday 104 2. Will Hull KR score more than 50 against Salford? Yes 54 3. Will any player score three or more tries in Wigan vs Warrington? No - Thewlis got 2 4. Will Castleford beat Wakefield? No 5. Will Barrow still be in 2nd place after Sunday's fixtures? Yes, on 13 pts ahead of Toulouse on 12 @Barley Mow takes the win. 4 for Barley Mow 3 for sam4731 2 for daz39

Bradford v Sheffield E 3208 Hunslet v Widnes 860 Swinton v N. Walkes 801 Whitehaven v Dewsbury 626

And perhaps worth noting that even with the wealth and backing of Sir John Hall (and the support/ branding of NUFC), the ice hockey and basketball teams weren't really a success and 30 years later the rugby union team is on life support.

I think there's perhaps niches other than geographical ones these days - offering a different experience to your local football team somehow. We do this to some extent - easy to get tickets, lots of children and women in the crowd, players are accessible and turn up at your school or club. The in-ground experience that Perez put on at Toronto is maybe an example of that. The Hundred in cricket is perhaps another. If I was picking random locations to plant a semi-pro eam in the UK, though, I would really not have picked Cornwall. I'd be looking either at Northern home counties - Bedford/ Cambridge travel to work area. Or Kent or south Essex where you have a relatively large affluent population that mostly supports London football teams.

But that's my point really. It's pointless to compare Melbourne with Gateshead. Newcastle is a relatively small, not particularly wealthy city, with very well entrenched sporting loyalties (ok, that latter is true for Melbourne too). Its rugby union team had won the rugby union premiership the season before, and John Hall who owned the football and rugby clubs had also launched an ice hockey team and basketball team, both in the top tiers of their sport. Unlike Melbourne, it doesn't have many people who've moved there from RL supporting places. Newcastle United's annual revenue for 2023/4 was around the AUD$650 million mark - a little over eight times bigger than the Brisbane Broncos. We're a niche sport. If we're going to pick random places on the map to plant an expansion team, it needs to be somewhere where there's a niche to occupy.

There's a broken down train currently stopped near the Ribblehead viaduct. It's been there since yesterday. The engine is named 'Ingleborough', which is of course right by where it's stopped, and one of the Yorkshire three peaks that most of the thousands of people walking by the sidings will be going up and down today.