JonM

Toulouse were 24-0 up against Widnes after 30 minutes, but two cracking tries from Ryan Millar in the last few minutes of the half make it 24-8 HT.

Widnes fans this week have had transport disrupted by strikes, weather problems, police shooting teenagers dead etc. and yet people somehow manage to take different flights, or use trains, hire cars or even buses. Toulouse is a big city in a country with superb transport infrastructure. Getting to Albi or Carcassonne is hardly difficult if that's where these games end up being rather than Blagnac. Minimes is used by the Elite 1 side, but I'm not sure it'd cope with a couple of thousand paying spectators - it's more of a community sports facility than a stadium now.

I guess he's been fired by Widnes previously (the old board, of course). I'd be pretty pleased if this turns out to be the case. I suppose it depends on whether he wants to move back from France again. Besides him, there is of course another current Catalans/ St. Esteve coach who is an ex-Widnes player and international who is often mentioned when these kinds of jobs come up.

Must be a few years since we started and finished the season with the same coach, so you probably wouldn't want to be giving up the day job if you were to take it on. The recent home game against London and the first half against Swinton yesterday were among the worst performances I ever seen by a Widnes team. Difficult to understand how we have gone from what looked, after the first few games, like a pretty decent team in with a shout of making the play-offs, to yesterday's disorganised rabble. Kieran Dixon, and one or two others, look like they care, but there was no organisation or team spirit.

Hard to see Widnes winning again this season the way we're playing. I think 14 points is probably enough to be safe, but we have a run of 4 games against Keighley, Whitehaven, Newcastle and York, and losing all 4 of those would make it pretty close.

2823 for the Championship relegation four-pointer between Widnes and Swinton.

Widnes 0 Swinton 14 after 30 minutes.

I have a friend who works making custom submarines. They make them for military purposes, scientific research, private individuals, tourist operations. There is even a thriving second-hand market. Quite surprising to me.

Sonar. It's pretty much the only viable comms for submarines at that depth. Obviously bandwidth is pretty limited, so they couldn't do much more than send location. Transponder on the sub and on the support vessel - not much more complicated than a big speaker and microphones.

September through until December IIRC, at the rate of 1 per week (two actual games, as the men and womens games run in parallel).

Which puts things into some kind of context - the NRL annual revenue is bigger than say West Ham FC, but not as big as say Tottenham Hotspur FC. The three big football clubs in the north west of England each had a turnover around £600M in 2021 (Covid affected, obviously).

It was £2.2 million pre-covid. The 2021 final was limited to 40K by Covid.

Even 3 of these 7 would be pretty good. I'd even take 'a sparse but actually existing international programme' or 'participation numbers level off, albeit via touch' as being good outcomes.

Sadly, no. I suspect there's a few clubs who will have done something similar. The record is probably Sheffield Eagles in their promotion season - played at the grounds of Sheffield United, Sheffield Wednesday, Wakefield Trinity, Barnsley FC, Chesterfield FC, Doncaster RLFC and possibly some more (a regal trophy game at Halifax?)

I think iii) is a reasonably sizeable number of people and possibly the one that's held up the best. I've been to every final at the new Wembley. I'd say it's category ii) where the numbers have dropped the most. There do seem to be far fewer 'neutral' fans of northern clubs in attendance - used to be pretty much guaranteed that you'd see jerseys of every club as you travelled round London. Last few years, I'm not sure I'd even say I saw jerseys from every SL club. I think numbers in category i) have dropped sharply too. I remember Widnes being genuinely emptied for Wembley - you could buy tickets at the chip shop, there were special trains and so on. It's hard to imagine that happening anywhere now. It was very noticeable last year with the final at Tottenham with a fourth tier football play-off on the same day - Mansfield Town vs Port Vale. Both of those clubs brought far more people than Wigan or Huddersfield RL clubs did, and perhaps part of that is that it's possibly a once in a generation kind of thing in football. Hard for Wigan to generate that level of interest when fans may have been to 40+ finals. Presumably the RFL have this data though.

In the PNG highlands, there's been top level clubs expelled from the competition recently due to attacks on referees. Seems to me that the RFL could do something about this - tell the coaches and players this is what is going to happen, and then enforce it. We've allowed professional players to be constantly attempting to contest or influence the referee's decisions and it could easily be stopped. The fact that pretty much every game, even at kids level, is available for replay on video means that every mistake or judgement call can be looked at again and again. I think it's also the case that the game has become so fast and complicated that the referee's job is really difficult and their decisions and style can have a big impact. I doubt cricket or football managers brief their squads on the particular foibles of an umpire or referee before a game. I'd be interested to see trial games with multiple officials, each with their own role, as happens in say American football. Obviously recruiting that number of extra officials would be really difficult.

Yes, I was very much in agreement with your general point.

Sounds like complete chaos at Hampden last night. Aside from the rain delays to the game (and difficulties getting the Georgia team back on the pitch by the sounds of it), there were problems outside. The rain was so strong that many people's printed out tickets were ruined just by showing them to security before they got to the turnstiles, and those with phones struggled to get the phone working enough to display the ticket on the screen.

Players sometimes do sometimes need to signal 6 again to their team-mates, who might not have been in a position to see that the opposition had played the ball.

I assume, as the story has been removed, TotalRl.com won't want it to be repeated on the forum. Nothing at all serious though, possibly just someone at his new club being a little over-sensitive.

Probably makes sense to keep the cameras on him and Warner, just in case they get up to their old tricks.

Feels like the Aussies are playing for the draw, tbh. Really negative field.

This is standard British English pronunciation. I don't think I've ever heard a native speaker do otherwise in normal speech. Similarly, the use of 'thee' for emphasis, for example 'thee' best vs 'thuh' best.

I was there for one of the previous records, Jason Gallian for Lancs v Derbys at Blackpool in the 1990s, although I don't remember whether it was slowest by time or by balls, and I think there was a young Scottish lad who took the record a couple of years back. Gallian followed it up with a slow triple century also against Derbyshire a couple of years later.

One of several pretty interesting county championship games in this round, along with Surrey chasing down 500+ to win after being 145 all out in their first innings, Notts snatching a draw after following on 400+ behind, Sussex and Worcs going into the final over with all 4 outcomes possible...