JonM

https://www.sportenfrance.com/ is working fine too.

Yes, working just fine.

Joss Naylor - a lovely man, and a life well lived. https://cumbriacrack.com/2024/06/29/fell-running-legend-joss-naylor-dies-aged-88/

I've been there for both cricket and AFL games and found it a fantastic venue. Obviously those sports maybe have different ideal viewing conditions to RL but I bet it's still a superb place for SOO.

Some games have had late KO changes due to the England soccer game later in the day, so if there are places showing a change from 15:00 to an earlier time indicated somewhere, I'd tend to believe that earlier KO time.

None appears to be the correct answer - lack of available flights and hotel rooms. I guess we'll see whether any of the TMS team found a way to get there later on. The pitch for the SA v Afghanistan game was truly dreadful, not sure the Afghan batting can be blamed when you see the highlights.

So, England in a world cup semi-final taking place today. Guess how many UK media representatives will be attending the match in person?

It was indeed Ron Marler. Ian Frame, the main sports editor was the father of a work colleague of mine.

Kimber reached 200 off 100 balls, by far the fastest ever in the county championship.

Very much agree. The response you get does vary a lot though - much of eastern Europe and in Scandinavia people will usually ask why anyone would bother. Much of southern Europe you'll be treated as a long list friend. In Japan, where there is a belief that their language is uniquely impossible for foreigners to learn, even a few words will astonish people.

Crusaders weren't either. They were given a 3 year franchise in SL having lost the national League final to Salford, and allowed to have 13 overseas players rather than 3 IIRC. They played one season in Bridgend (and a couple of other places, eg Newport). The UK border agency investigation found that six players were working illegally and had to leave the country. Leighton Samuels decided to stop funding the club, and they were sold to new owners in Wrexham. They went into administration the following year and got a points deduction for that and were wound up completely the following year and decided not to apply for a further SL franchise.

We did a count up once and between the 9 of us, there were 20 languages spoken with the average being nearly 4. Helped by one lad who spoke 10 or 11 though.

English native speaker. French, Spanish to the level where I can read newspapers, books, get most but not all of film, tv programmes, conversation with one person. Welsh to a point where I can read BBC website and children's books but only simple conversations. German GCSE but only tourist level really. Few other languages where I can do hello, yes, no, thank you, Bill please type stuff - Finnish and Japanese for example.

Thanks for posting this Gomersall. Managed to catch a pretty close game between Whistler and Point Grey. Fair number of antipodean accents to be heard but plenty of Canadians too and a decent standard of play. Lots of sponsorship evident.

Pretty sure Warrington chairman Simon Moran could get the RFL a good deal on Gary Barlow's services

Our club wembley tickets were £20 each. Hotel & petrol for me were more than 10x that amount. The pizza & drink we had before going into the stadium were also approx £20 apiece. As you can't park at Wembley, I'd suggest that most people in those seats would've spent half that amount just on the TFL fare for the day. All of which suggests that the actual price of tickets is not a big factor in people deciding whether to go or not. It's a tiny proportion of the overall cost. That's not true for normal league games of course, but it is for games in London. If the RFL belief is that it's the cost which stops people from attending, they'd be better off looking at cheaper transport options. A train ticket to London from the North is several times more expensive than a match ticket. I think we're missing a trick not pulling all the stops out to get junior clubs there en masse. It's a much more family friendly event than the Grand Final. Free ticket to each club for each registered junior player who wants to go, provided they buy some appropriate number of adult tickets. Do it months before the finalists are known, upper tier only and don't sell the seats for that area to anyone else. Offer them discounts if they hit target numbers of adult tickets. Clubs will need to sort out booking their own coaches etc. Alternatively, same kind of thing for every entrant into the Champions schools competition. Maybe not a big money spinner but a great way to build a love of the game for those kids and hopefully their parents go along for the day. This kind of thing worked brilliantly for the England v Brazil world cup game in Leeds.

Tickets are crazily cheap in comparison with the cost of actually getting to the match, even from another part of London, or compared to food & drink in and around London.

There were indeed huge expanses of closed off empty seats for that semi-final, as a few seconds on YouTube will show. Compare yesterday's attendance with those for football play-offs, England internationals etc. We guessed around 62K-64K before the figure was announced.

£3 for coffee - bet you'd struggle to find it for that outside the ground.

Well indeed.

It's not insurance, BTW. It's the law.

Yes, same in Italy - and the letter from your doctor has to include an ECG and spirometry results. Not just running - same is required for 5-aside football, basketball and any other recreational sport. However, they seem to have accepted that parkrun is ok as a non-competitive event. There is also a different culture to France- the Rome Marathon, for example tells everyone they must bring their certificates, but they don't check them, and the attitude is well, if you have a heart attack and die and you got a fake certificate, then on your own head be it.

Took advantage of being in London for the cup final to do Bushy parkrun. Nice park in a nice bit of London. First time I have not been in the top 400 at parkrun

Looked and sounded great inside the ground.

Looked about 65k to me. I'm assuming you weren't there