JonM

Curlews and oystercatchers hanging out by one of the smaller waterfalls at lunchtime. Also a couple of pheasants sat on one of my drystone walls, mouse building a nest inside the wall, and various small birds darting about with bits of moss and so on. Lots of lambs starting to appear, although the first of those were in January. Spring is here.

See & hear lapwings most days here, and my wife always reckons they sound like 1980s computer games. Random bird name related fact - subbeteo, the table football game, is named for the latin name for the Hobby bird-of-prey.

Their turnover is bigger than SL clubs because they have more money coming in each year. Their profit (loss) is a large negative number because they spend a lot more than SL clubs each year. HTH. The SARU paid just short of £15 million in travel costs for the participation of their clubs in the URC. Amusingly, they used to make a profit from taking part in the competition in Aus/NZ, and now make a loss from playing in Europe.

You'll find plenty of people in PNG saying why spend that money on sport at all when it could be spent on other infrastructure - schools, hospitals etc. And plenty more saying China will build us a new stadium, we don't need money from Australia. Given China's recent agreement with the Solomon Islands, you can see why the Australian PM might want to stump up relatively small amounts of cash in government terms to buy some soft power & influence and goodwill from Papuans.

He describes rugby union as the simpler version in that article...

Using Cardiff Blues (by no means the biggest club in the URC) as an example, their turnover was £13 million in 2021-22, so roughly 50% higher than Saints? Like the other Welsh URC teams, it is heavily loss-making, but hard to argue they're smaller than British rugby league clubs.

President Biden supports the PNG NRL bid is the rather unlikely front page story of the country's no.1 newspaper, The National. https://www.thenational.com.pg/us-backs-png-nrl-bid/

Just in case anyone involved with a community team hasn't seen this competition: https://game.northernrailway.co.uk/rugby

Think you chose a good day for it though, was absolutely torrential rain yesterday. I went along the Pennine Way from Hawes down to Gearstones and back which is pretty much gravel track, rock or even tarmac all the way, so no problems actually running, although there was about 10-15cm of snow on the highest bits. Absolutely lovely - sunny and clear so great views, but with thick snow on the top of all the hills, although there was a lot more on Wether Fell & Dodds Fell than on the higher hills to the south (Whernside, Inglebrough). Aurora visible tonight too.

I've seen quotes saying that around 5000 tickets were sold to people in the UK.

What I've been hearing from people in Australia is that AFL has its season opening game Sydney vs Brisbane at the SCG on Thursday and that fixture has barely got a mention in the Sydney & Brisbane media this week as the Vegas thing has had saturation coverage. So I think they'll be happy on that score.

Just counter-balancing the negative piece they ran on Friday https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/mar/02/nrl-in-las-vegas-2024-american-fans-popularity

(Just speculating) - perhaps some ability to upsell live tv to betting website operators. Presumably people like to watch the things they're betting on. There is definitely a market for sports data rights for gambling - low tens of millions of dollars per year for the Premier League, so probably not a huge amount for the NRL.

With the short, narrow pitch, we should send Bradford Bulls The video of the pitch being rolled into place is seriously impressive.

I've never known Widnes not to have an attendance figure available, it is generally announced at the match. We've only had one competitive home game so far this season, in the Challenge Cup against Doncaster, and a crowd figure was published for that. Batley had figures for every game last season on their website.

Yes, I posted it on the attendance thread earlier in the week. I think a lot of it is that some people on here place more importance on it than maybe the clubs do, or at least the people doing media/ comms for the clubs. Taking Swinton as an example, they always give a figure when the website gets updated, but that might not be until Tuesday/Wednesday. Other clubs often give the figure on social media but not in their match report. Batley are one of the clubs called out above, but considering their website hasn't been updated in several weeks, it's probably more that no-one has time to do things like this than any attempt to hide the figure. AFAICT, it's only Hull KR who are deliberately not publishing a figure.

And crucially, the combine is starting now and is filling the NFL related tv channels this weekend. It's a good way to highlight that NRL players are strong, fast, agile etc. I suspect that NRL players are more likely to run 40 yards than most NFL players are...

724 was the figure given.

I *think* it's originally because there were several different scouting organisations with their own trials in different parts of the country, and they were combined to form one week-long event in Indianapolis. And the Indianapolis Colts themselves think it's not a good predictor of player performance and don't take part...

746 Swinton/ Oldham

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/feb/27/nrl-las-vegas-season-launch-2024-allegiant-stadium Guardian piece about history of attempts to promote RL in the US.

724 for Halifax/ Hammersmith 1477 for Keighley/ Fev Some clubs (Swinton for example) give figures when they update their website later in the week.

Not sure if we have had these already Salford Cas 4770 Huddersfield Saints 6812

Been hearing that the Hammersmith Hills Hoists players, officials and fans were delighted with their big day out and the hospitality and way they were looked after by Halifax.

Even the top academy teams typically only have at most a handful of players per year go on into the professional game. Quite a few of their recent academy players seem to be playing university RL now.