And so is my wife!! LOL.

Oh so it's bait now and you were fishing - never heard that excuse from someone who's been caught out before - poor effort son.

So which social club might that be - tonight I have been dining with a Journalist friend at the Hurlingham Club Fulham - make of that what you will my social superior.

RL is not yet a big sport in Toulouse because it is not yet professional The club is dawing the same numbers of fans as Catalans did before they joined Super League.

Once Toulouse enters Super League, expect it to emulate Catlans with a five fold increase in average attendance to around 6,000 in the first year.



Avignon, the third French candidate for SL (after Toulouse succeeds), is not a village either. Its population for the city proper is 95,000, but the metropolitan area has a population of 290,000. Moreover it would represent and attract fans from the entire Vaucluse Department (of which it is the capital) and that Department has a population of 530,000.

Wakefield District has a population of 325,000. The Vaucluse Department is bigger than the rugby league clubs Wakefield, Castleford and Featherstone combined catchment area (i.e. Calder United) I must say.

If you're making a fair comparison then Vaucluse is a county, equivalent to county of West Yorkshire, which has a population 2.1m.

That would make the Wakefield district bigger than the metropolitan area (325k is bigger than 290k)

So, try again.

There was NEVER anything wrong with being a "flatcapper".

RL fans argue adamantly that the visual metaphor of a working-class man in traditional dress with his (working) dog beside him is mostly used by southerners who perceive their cousins in the north to be disheveled, culturally backward, mentally retarded and so forth. Whilst it is certainly true that this stereotype was once popular (although I suspect not among the overwhelming majority of working class people in the south who knew a class-oriented slur when they saw one) it is far less so today - especially since flat caps stopped featuring prominently at Matalan.

I suspect it would have all but faded from memory had it not been for the legion of self-avowed "modernist" Rugby League fans who, [idespite years of railing against the injustice[/i, have perversely twisted its meaning to apply exclusively to those "culturally backward, mentally retarded etc." fans who do not share their grand vision for the future of the sport.

Given the very real prejudice this game of ours has suffered; the interminable struggles and even bloodshed - I can think of no greater slur to level at a fellow supporter. Fans who are lavish with its use [uaren't - period.[/uThey are the fawning Nazi stooges in countries such as France, Belgium, Holland and Poland during WWII who enthusiastically ratted on "culturally backward, mentally retarded etc." Jews, gypsies and even fellow countrymen and then stood, counting the blood-stained banknotes by the side of the railway, as they were shunted off to a miserable end in Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

You were doing alright until that last paragraph. Are you seriously suggesting that a social slur or a put down on an internet forum ranks persons on the level of collaborationist traitors who would sell their countryman to certain death in the concentration camps. That's crazy talk.

Making a comparison does not mean you automatically equate the two things you are comparing.

Yeah, but the point Jean is making is that the large city of Avignon would have no local Superleague competition.

And that's a good thing? Hmm.

I didn't think I needed to be more obvious. But for your sake - no.

What I am saying is wearing the clothes of your supposed enemy and then treating a portion of your own fans in precisely the same manner (I'd say - an even worse manner given that you know, only too well, the sting of that slur) is flat out treachery. So much so I shouldn't be surprised if Dictionary.com doesn't appropriate such as the very definition of the word.

OTY SmokeyTA, MjM, Ferocious Aardvark, Him, etc.

Surely expansion should be done from the bottom upwards, with Super League and the Championship looking the same with 14 teams and Championship 1 increasing to 14 teams each with a longer term view to adding a 10 team Championship 2 at some stage down the line, and possibly increasing SL & Championship to leagues of 16.

In RL expansion works different to what it dose in any other business, the people at the top seem so hell bent in getting away from being known as a a northern sport that they word let most of the smaller northern SL teams go to the wall so they can get in to bead with are southern Friends, they would love nothing more than getting 4 or 5 RU teams from darn south to start a RL team, but they cant get it in to there heads, why would they risk RL working in a dominated RU strong hold

Its almost as if they are ashamed to be a Northern sport and our history.

They are mate, they hate us and they hate themselves for their dropped vowels and and general dislike of salads. They are like the kid who tell everyone their dads a sales director and has a BMW when he actually works in a call centre and drives a Reliant Robin. They are little snobs. Give em a sniff of rejoining the Union and they would wet themselves at the though of visiting London Welsh or Saracens.

Me I'm not even a northerner, certainly not RL territory but I really wish I was. There is a genuine sense of identity being a northerner - especially a Yorkshire man that is utterly absent anywhere else in England other than much maligned Cornwall.

Yet in a way only Northerners seem capable of we reject it instead of harnessing it.

Some on here would gladly reject hot beds of the game like Cas or Halifax for Glasgow (as if) or Basingstoke purely because in makes them feel more cosmopolitan and eases their insecurities. No other sport would even contemplate that. No other sport fans would be arrogant enough to assume these place even wanted RL which time after time they have shown they don't!

They have been destroying our game for year with their pipe dreams and sneering at any flatcapper stereotype who dares to argue - they bully and name call until the opposition gives up. Just see Smokey and his endless sub quoted replies to get the mentality.

Still RL is a broad church and we accept their right to an opinion, damaging and usually pointless as they are

I don't accept their opinion.

I'm the same. I don't accept their opinion. There needs a radical change in RL but the $64000 question is how and who to run it as a substainable business.

One of League's biggest mistakes has been to perceive our northern, working-class heritage as a hindrance rather than an avenue to success. After all, there are as many people who crave something different from sport as there are bricks in the Wembley Stadium.

It's [ipitiful[/i to watch league fans' balls shrivel up like raisins when some TV or radio anchor describes the game as a "Northern" or, worse still, "M62-based". Even more embarrassing are the ever-so-earnest soap-box orators quoting the modernist party line like some Bolshevik commissar whilst the host struggles to give a and win at Angry Birds at the same time.

Look, if people want to pursue some utopian future in which SL is played out among, say, the top 12 biggest cities in Britain - fine. That's their business. That's their right. But sans Saints my interest will be limited. And sans the other clubs I'm sure a further, colossal, chunk of support will follow suit. If the new competition can stand such losses and remain successful then it has my warmest wishes for the future.

Their is no "union dominated stronghold" other than in the over imaginative dreamworlds thought up by idiots on RL forums.
Union is so UNDOMINANT in London that London Irish play in Reading, London Welsh in Oxford and Wasps in Wycombe.....Harlequins play in Middlesex and up until this year, Sarries played in Hertfordshire.....NO London Clubs

You think that the RFL live in the hope of getting Wasps or Sarries to try where Harlequins failed?

You make a bag of spanners look sane mate

The lack of London based teams is due to the availability of suitable stadiums. There isn't more interest in RU in Oxford or Reading than London.

You think what you want but if any one of those teams you mention, put forward a plan to enter a RL team, they would snatch there hand of, in your words Harlequins, is a failed venture, so why dose the RL keep than in the SL, any smaller club in SL is at risk the RL, have got expansion on the brain, RL, is a Northern sport and that wont change and believe it or not RU, is the dominant oval ball sport in Britain,& Europe they have the backing of the TV, tabloids, & multi millions from Sky and any other thing you might think off, we are having a would cup next year we wont get sellouts for most if any of the games, if buy some miracle England win the wourld cup will the full team get honers from the Queen like RU, did i think not, it might be hard for us to accept but RU, dwarfs RL, and it wont change, its about time people stopped thinking its a bad thing to be Northern, so mr gutterfax you can stick those spanners up

First up pal.....please god invest in a decent Keyboard.



Secondly, I never said Union wasn't the dominant OVAL ball sport.....of course it is, but it doesn't dominate the sporting landscape anywhere other than maybe little old NZ. Elsewhere, if fights for attention with other minor sports.

Next up....the backing of TV, Tabloids and Multi Millions from SKY........

Union is a basket case at club level, if not worse than League, then not far from it. They struggle for crowds in the Aviva the same way ESL does and it's only Internationally that they are giants when compared to League.

If England RL won the RLWC then I am sure a couple would get honours from Lizzy...unless you're suggesting that not only are the media, mainstream sponsors, the general public and the pope against RL, but also the German/Greek Alliance that you lot bend your knees too as well



As for your last comments......RU is a far bigger, better run and more popular sport than RL is, in the UK & Europe, but to say that this will never change is plain stupid. It can change......it will maybe one day change, but not using the current expansionist crap that occupies other threads on here.

Finally pal, you need to wise up. If your dream of a return to the insular days of RL was to happen, I have no doubt that whilst you and maybe a few others would love it, the decline in crowds once the sport returned to semi professionalism, together with the continued talent drain to other sports or countries and the lack of mainstream sponsors would soon see SKY oull their funding......you'd return to a winter sport and soon disappear up your own s.

I think I was actually unfair to the bag of spanners mate

I agree with you, RL, is a better game than RU, & summer is the time to play, i would love to put RU in the shadow of are game, but i can't see that happening, if you pick up a paper RU gets a good page or two, RL gets a few lines or just the scores and thats in the Northern area, in other areas your lucky to get a mention, on SKY last week they covered RU for about 5 or 6 hrs on Saturday, and started again on Sunday, we get 1 game Friday & 1 game Monday, i agree at club level RL is a much better product, but as for funding from SKY i would swap contracts with RU, any day. My point was the international, in that part of the game we are unable to compete and nothing looks like changing i wish it would
As for expansion the people who run the game are Hell bent on breaking out of the Northern areas, but instead of taking it in small steps and establishing a team in to the RL they go out full tilt and fast track a team to SL, and with only one exception it sinks, lastly what the hell is wrong with my keyboard, it works when i it the letters, it must be me my hands are too big for the keys, you can insult me all you like but please don't bring my keyboard in to it. and its nice to have a new mate

That is one I will give to the London dreamers. It is an issue and one in which the RFL should have sorted years ago. I do agree it is a big problem for a London based team.

I disagree with your last comment, in my experience there is more interest in RU everywhere but the north.

Nearly out of breath reading that.