JonM

The year that Liverpool won the league and Widnes won the league in the late 70s, there was an "It's a knockout" type event with the players from both squads taking part, I think as part of a joint testimonial. Unimaginable that something like that would happen today, such is the gulf.

The locals speak better English in Geneva too. Leigh or Toronto?

Talkin tarn looks very nice. There's quite a big hole in the north pennines/ yorkshire dales/ south lakeland in terms of parkrun coverage.

If you look at the England team today, the players mostly come from a small number of sources. 1 People who went to Private or Public schools (Zak Crawley, Jos Buttler, Ollie Robinson etc.) 2 Sons of immigrants from cricket playing countries (Haseeb Hamed, Ben Stokes etc.) 3 People who learned to play cricket abroad but who came to England to play professional cricket (Dawid Malan, Jofra Archer). 4 People who are the sons of professional cricketers (Stuart Broad, Jonny Bairstow). 5 People who came through club cricket, usually in the north (Joe Root, Jimmy Anderson, Mark Wood). There's people like Sam Cowan who fit more than one of those categories. Long term problem we have is that the numbers from categories 2,3 and 5 are falling and category 4 is a pretty small number of people.

It's the same sort of magical thinking that makes out that the England RL team will be improved by a smaller SL, or a different play-off format, or adding/removing relegation.

Leigh won the league in the 1980s. They've got several decades of waiting to catch up with Warrington I do think we've got to the point where the relentless negativity of fans on social media is putting off wealthy people from spending their money on RL clubs. You end up with the kind of people who don't care what others think as a result.

No - the remaining teams are mostly competing in Federale Poule 4 - which contains teams which formerly played in the Rhones-Alpes and Ile-du-France leagues. There were teams like Roanne (former winners of both Lord Derby Cup and Elite 1) in the Rhones-Alpes area who've disappeared at senior level in the last few years.

There was a whole league in the Rhone-Alpes, and 4-5 teams in Lyon, only a few years ago. Ile-du-France had its own league with a similar number of teams in Paris until recently, too.

I doubt anyone will have a prediction for top 3 that doesn't include both Leigh and Fev. If a bookie was offering 7/4, I'd consider that a value bet.

St Ives played some games in 2021, but didn't complete the season in the East Rugby League. Bedford Tigers ran two mens sides last year and a women's team, and hope to add a second womens team this year. Eastern Rhinos still going too. Ten teams in the East RL for 2022, with some clubs from the East playing in the southern conference too. Plenty of Essex teams - Brentwood, Southend, Canvey Island.

Chatillon are operating a joint team with Paris Charenton in Federale Poule 4, which also includes Marseille, two teams from the Vaucluse area (around Avignon), another Paris team (Corbeil) and Vaulx-en-Velin from Lyon.

The story of how it was written is interesting in itself. Very, very unusual to get a £1 million advance (and a huge print run and translation into 15+ languages before publication) for a debut novel that she'd written in her spare time over the course of more than a decade.

One of the most memorable pieces of fiction I've read in years. Nothing like her previous one, and it's the kind of book that a lot of people will hate I think.

46-6 the final score.

Not embarrassing at all. My son could do 17 minutes previously, but he's had a (not running-related) injury which stopped him doing anything for a year and is currently going round in 35-40 minutes. Plenty of people behind him still. The whole point of parkrun is you go at your own speed - plenty of people run a bit, walk a bit or just walk round.

You may well end up still paying national insurance, of course, because that's calculated on a weekly basis, not annually. Any week where you earn over £184 you will get some deduction for NI. Seeing as I'm in the 45% tax bracket, I reckon it should be me paying for the drinks

As you said in your post though, it's about tv revenue, and Bangladeshi tv doesn't provide any, which is why they get a 2 game test series once per decade or so. We go there March next year, but only for ODI & T20 games.

Don't miss the clip of what is probably the second worse DRS review ever.

My wife, had (for a while), 3 jobs, each of which was very part-time, and also quite variable in pay. (One of them was exam invigilating, which paid only in April, May, June, for example). The total income for all of them was below the income tax threshold. Sounds like a similar situation to yours. She was able to phone up HMRC and essentially allocate part of her allowance to each one, so that she didn't have to go through the rigmarole of paying tax and then claiming it back. (I.e she said, £7000 on this one, £4000 on this one, £1000 on this one kind of thing). My experience (and hers) is that they are super helpful and knowledgeable when you phone up. I imagine now is by a long way their busiest time of the year because self-assessment tax forms (millions of people) have to be done and any tax due to be paid by Jan 31st.

Any thoughts on whether this is likely to be postponed? The forecast is for about 1C, so I guess the pitch wouldn't have frozen. I'm in York today and tomorrow, supposed to be driving back down to Cambridge in the evening, but maybe I could go after the game.

Seems like a bigger gulf between the top and bottom than in recent years. Swinton, Keighley & Doncaster's squads wouldn't be out of place in the championship. At least West Wales will fancy picking up some wins this year.

Interesting looking at the attendances of that year's County Cups. Blackpool's first round game had an attendance only a couple of hundred lower than Salford's. Barrow vs Whitehaven in the first round got a bigger crowd than the 2499 watching Cas v Huddersfield in the Yorkshire Cup. Saints v Warrington at Knowsley Road got 5000, and Warrington's semi-final vs Barrow at Wilderspool got 3349. And yet people like to hark back to this mythical golden age when grounds were full. I'm fairly sure I'm correct in saying that Borough Park was the newest stadium in British sport for most of the 1960s. Also that Borough beat both Wigan and Leeds there in the 1979-80 season.

Hmm. Tymal Mills is on £1.4 million annual salary in the IPL. He's pretty much unavailable for England games outside of the world cup as a result. Every test country accepts it won't get first choice of players during the 10-game IPL season.

Have a look at "351, Cherry Hinton Road" on Google streetview and you'll see how good the original photo is though.

I used to walk past this site everyday. I have some sympathy for both sides of the argument here. We have ~250 000 people working in Cambridge, and only ~150 000 people living here. In the last few years, there's been several new small towns built in the surrounding area, tens or hundreds of houses built in each of the surrounding villages, many thousands of new houses built in the city itself and in satellite towns like Haverhill. I'm aware of people turning down £100K jobs in the city because they can't afford to live there, and know people doing ridiculous commutes from places 90+ minutes away. We badly need more housing here. It's not the fault of the local council that national economic policy over the last 40+ years has concentrated all those well paid technology/software, biotech/medical jobs into the city. The house that was knocked down to build those flats was sold for £850K, and was barely habitable. I suspect the one on the right would fetch over a million. This is on a main road, well out from the city centre, with loads of other flats, a petrol station, TA centre, 70s cul-de-sacs - it's not a visually attractive part of town. We need the six flats that have been built much more than we need million pound Victorian semis. It does seem stupid to have all those parking spaces when there's a cycle path right outside the door, in a city where bikes are by far the fastest way to get around and most people do cycle. But there's no on-street parking at all, and a shared garden for those six flats might not get maintained, particularly when you have a large, beautiful park a minute or so away.