JonM

And yet, go to India, you'll see cricket being played on any surface. As a kid, we used to play RL on the concrete school playground, with a tin can for a ball, or even someone's pump nicked out of their PE bag. You were pretty motivated not to get caught in possession - and perhaps an explanation of why my primary school produced 3 halfbacks who played for GB in the 1980s-1990s.

I tend to run rather than walk, but I've done quite a few of the UK's long-distance paths, and the Hebridean Way is definitely my favourite so far. Some of the best shorter walks you really have to pick your time - the experience of say Malham Cove & Janet's Foss, or Dovedale in the Peak District would be rather different on a sunny summer bank holiday weekend...

I wonder how easy/ difficult it would be for someone to preserve these programmes for posterity by scanning them. Suspect it would be a massive undertaking to do this manually, but I assume there must be devices which can turn the pages automatically, as large quantities of books have been scanned this way?

Did York win on aggregate across the two legs?

12 207 was the announced figure.

It was widely stated as being a sell-out, so I'm not quite sure why the figure was several thousand down on capacity.

Canberra v Gold Coast 11 738 Wests v St. George 17 141 Parramatta v N. Queensland 14 443 NZ Warriors v Manly 23 076 Widnes v Halifax 2 558 Saints v Warrington 11 280 Castleford v Wigan 4097

Quite the turnaround from 4-14 at half-time to finish 40-14, but I thought we were on top even in the first half in spite of a bit of a lack of speed and intensity, just that we bombed a couple of tries and some great cover defence from Fax at times, whereas Halifax had three chances to score and took them all, with a couple of poor pieces of goal-line defence. Some brilliant passages of play from Widnes to get three tries in a bit over five minutes at the start of the second half, but we did get a couple of lucky bounces of the ball on kicks that led to tries and then Halifax fell apart a bit, and of course they started trying a bit too hard to catch up which led to more tries. Owens was obviously our best player, his lack of pace is deceptive .

Cracking first half that.

Looked a lot more like a strip than an attempted offload.

Is that the first penalty?

Charnley kinda saved 2 points there by continuing to chase Burgess right to the line and stopping him going under the posts.

Few games that could go either way this weekend - I reckon York v Wakefield is the only one where I'd probably have double figures for the handicap.

Brisbane Broncos v Dolphins 46 224 Melbourne Storm v Canterbury-Bankstown 16065 Newcastle vs Sydney Roosters 21940

So out of interest, on what basis do they decide which local council to use? The York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority is in charge of some things - police, fire brigade, quite a big chunk of devolved central government funding for housing, transport, infrastructure etc. and the city council is responsible for others - education & social care for example. Is it who collects the bins, or who collects speeding tickets that matters ?

London Broncos having a lower population catchment area than say Whitehaven (and around a third of the catchment population of York) shows just how well thought through the whole system is. I live around 90 minutes drive from York, but count for their population score. Someone living on Riverside Road less than thirty seconds walk away from the Cherry Red Records stadium doesn't count for London Broncos catchment.

Plenty who already wanted him out a couple of months ago. We've played three teams who I think most people would have as likely bottom four possibles. Halifax at home next, who also failed to make the playoffs last season, so again the kind of game we need to win to stay out of relegation contention. We've not really had any bother with injuries so far, hence being able to send people out on loan. Pleasing thing for me has been the defence - averaging one point something try conceded per game so far.

1770 Halifax v Batley I've seen 450 given on social media for Whitehaven v Sheffield, but that seems very low, and is not from an official source.

It counts for us avoiding relegation Dewsbury just scored, not over yet.

Matty Fozzard has twice dived over from dummy half to make it Dewsbury 0 Widnes 22 after 10 minutes of the second half. Not really the weather to be passing the ball.

Dewsbury 0 Widnes 12 HT. Widnes playing into the wind in the second half, which is obviously a massive factor in this game, and presumably the same in all the others today.

None of the Widnes fans on here have picked Widnes to win this game, and I'm a bit surprised everyone else has. Dewsbury beat Batley pretty comfortably, and Batley won at Widnes last month, so they seem perfectly capable of winning even if we are 100% committed. Whitehaven beat Sheffield Eagles home and away last season, IIRC.

Leeds v Warrington 12 297

Indeed. I earn a good bit more than SL players do, still manage to do 7-8 hours training & running most weeks. One of the lads I used to manage was in the UK rowing set-up, didn't make the Olympics but did get Commonwealth medals. He'd be out on the river at 5am for hours before a full-days work, plus evenings & weekends for gym, weights, coaching, competitions etc. Big difference of course, is that neither running nor rowing require you to get physically battered and running the risk of serious injury every week, nor do they involve hundreds or thousands of people opining that you're not good enough, not trying hard enough to win etc.

Can't imagine the Bulldogs game would've been better attended at Belmore, where cover is pretty limited except along one side (and even those sat at the front of the main stand get wet)? Perhaps a good thing that Parra, Penrith & Wests are all away this weekend, as it looks much worse out west?