JonM

Meh. I'm OK with the players drinking together at the end of a tough tour. Although drinking with Nathan Lyon might have been a step too far. This is just media muckraking.

The choice between Wigan and a small town IN Wigan was interesting. Toronto or Vancouver

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Manchester & Liverpool get water from North Wales too. United Utilities has a regionally integrated system, so water for their customers can be drawn from the pennines, wales, lake district, local reservoirs etc. We don't have a national grid for water as such, but there is a fair bit of regional distribution that goes on, even in the drier bits of the country. Near me, for example, water gets taken out of the river Ouse in Norfolk, goes into an underground pipeline that comes out in the River Kennet near Newmarket, and then there's another pipeline that takes it another few miles into the river Stour. So water moves from the east anglian fens (not that much rain, but not many people) into the Essex rivers (Essex is also relatively dry, but has a lot more people).

RLIF CEO wasn't he?

They seemed to be having fun last night anyway, losing at home to Palace. "Let's pretend we scored a goal" got the whole stadium rocking, along with the chants of "sign him up, sign him up" from a pitch invader who missed an open goal.

Don't see it happening tbh. They *really* care about being better than Ipswich. When Norwich won 5-1 at Portman Road a couple of years ago, pretty much every road sign at the Norfolk border had a reference to it. The whole county supports the team. They love the fact that people like Delia & Stephen Fry own the club rather than dubious oligarchs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Anglian_derby

Next Aussie that sends me a comment saying "the easiest way to get a rapid test is to play England" gets a punch :-)

Still, at least the Wuhan street markets have lost their record for "worst use of a bat".

Outside of Agnew & the BBC commentary team + pals, everywhere I read before a ball was bowled seemed to be expecting a 5-0 whitewash, for all the above reasons, with the only hope of avoiding that that the 5th test might not be played, or we might get rain somewhere, or a double ton from Root to draw a game. Root has still won more games than he's lost as captain - his percentage win record is pretty similar to Strauss & Vaughan, and it's not like England play lots of tests against the weaker countries. Three tests in West Indies in March at least gives us a chance to play one of the other weaker test teams and perhaps find a win.

Yep, really have to hope that the penny has dropped at the RFL. We only have a long-term future as a sport if more people play, coach, referee and spectate. Touch/ tag are the best way to achieve that.

Yes, Hick scored over a hundred centuries in first-class cricket, second highest scorer of all time in first class cricket. As you say, he had to wait 7 years to qualify for England. Fairly mixed test career though, not well handled by the England team.

Every other forum I frequent was debating before the tour started whether England can sneak a draw in any of the games and make it a 4-0 rather than 5-0 loss. This is the only place I've seen any optimism at all - you've certainly shifted the dial a bit