The Frying Scotsman

@2blackrooks did you play?

You doing them in blocks with a recovery between I guess? You got a rough indication of how many per block?

Good to hear. The last thing you want is to have blown all that money and then found out it didn't work.

Interesting. What would you say is the difference these days?

Being interviewed post-fight, Gallen has basically confirmed he has no interest in chasing titles, and prefers to fight opponents who give him the biggest return financially. Sounds like he will be staying in Australia then. Shame, as I would love to have seen him try to take on 1 or 2 European opponents. 39 years old and 5'10'' at heavyweight - fair play to the guy for what he has done in the ring so far!

i have DAZN, but the product is miles below Sky UKs offering in terms of commentary, analysis etc. IMO anyway.

I believe it was 60aud on PPV! we do get fleeced though - lets not forget that. Parker - Chisora is the latest ridiculous offering to be sold as "Box Office". I certainly won't be paying for it.

Paul Gallen - well done son. Just KO'd Lucas Browne in 90 secs. Browne ain't great, but he is technically a former Heavyweight world champion.

I wouldn't be so sure. The performance director for England Touch is an Aussie guy brought in to drive performance. He was interviewed on the Magic Academy sports coaching podcast last year, and I couldn't believe that he didn't mention rugby league once in what was roughly a 1 hour discussion. He mentioned union, and 'contact' rugby several times, but I didn't hear one mention of Rugby League (and I was specifically listening for it). Given that Touch Australia is under the NRL umbrella I could only assume it was a calculated and very deliberate omission, given Australia are as I'm sure you know, serial world champions at almost every grade. He seemed to be really pandering to the union types, talking about how to attract people from union and vice versa. I referee Touch myself, and was fortunate enough to referee at the last European championships. It was a fantastic experience.

Currently on this.

Just seeing that list reminds me I played a game for Fife Lions back around 1999. I had completely forgotten about it. Dislocated my shoulder that day too.

good to hear. how was their first training session?

I thought Herring was excellent. Very impressive. As has been mentioned already, Frampton could get nothing out of him. Never really in doubt from Round 1 onwards.

OK. I was talking about far more recently than that. Crowds were nowhere near that level in 2018. I think we are saying (partly) the same thing - "Scotland RL doesn't have a presence" effectively means they have to fill the team with people who are not Scottish, and in the case of foreigners, guys who don't even live here. The net result is the same - a team that nobody identifies with, and nobody cares about. As I said to the Geek chap yesterday: that is fine if all the IRL want is competitive matches. However it will definitely not lead to some kind of renaissance of support from the Scottish public at large. They literally CGAF. That's why national team games are played in wee towns like Gala. I don't buy it that the 4Nations games couldn't have been played in Scotland due to "the RFL organising the tournament, and choosing where games are". That just reinforces what I was saying in fact: that they play in England because that's where they will get a crowd. The RFL could easily have said let's get these games played in Scotland, buy it would have been a tiny crowd rattling about in a small stadium and would have looked terrible on TV. The decision was therefore logically taken to play in England - due to the aforementioned indifference from the public here.

Are you talking about the 2018 game Vs Wales?? You'd be lucky if there was 350 people there. I don't think they have had a game there since? Or are you going back further? To an earlier period?