You don't like Hughes.....



.....everyone sussed that and heard you the first million or so times. This thread, was bravely introduced by Big Time and. IBRC, was about the visit of Leigh. Let's maybe screw back onto that thread.

Dixon is not in the Leigh 21:

1. Caleb Aekins
3. Keanan Brand
4. Nene Macdonald
5. Tom Nisbet
7. Joe Mellor
8. Adam Sidlow
9. Aaron Smith
10. Mark Ioane
11. Joe Wardle
12. Sam Stone
13. Tom Amone
16. Ed Chamberlain
17. Jacob Jones
18. John Asiata
21. Edwin Ipape
23. Krisnan Inu
24. Kai O’Donnell
25. Ben Nakubuwai
26. Blake Ferguson
27. Josh Charnley
30. Lachlan Lam

Can't see Dixon ever playing for Leigh again - or at least not this season!

Nor is it likely that Leigh will nil you by 64 this time, London are a much improved team and it may well be the visitors that ease their foot (feet?) off the gas. Who knows?

It may, or may not interest Londoners to know that Leigh’s first ever game under floodlights was at the White City Stadium in 1934. The home side, London Highfield won 25-8.

Some toff had seen an RL match and decided to buy a northern club and transfer them lock, stock and barrel to London. He also agreed to pay visiting teams’ expenses - shades of the now defunct Toronto there (furthermore he was Canadian!)

6,000 opening gate, later 10,500 in a warm-up for the Ozzies’ tour. The club made a loss in its only season and moved back up north.

There is one thing about this cautionary tale of RL expansionism that will vindicate Dead Cowboys’ grouses; London Highfield played in royal blue jerseys with yellow hoops! A certain late Londoner, Amy Winehouse, would be thinking, “Back to Black”.

It would be insincere to wish you luck this coming weekend. The pressure is off you, all the pressure is on the Shield winners for the idiotic play-offs.

May the best team win!

Cheers Budgie. He is(was?) an X factor player, slightly lightweight in defence sometimes but a definite asset. I think he moved(back) North for personal rather than work related reasons and it doesn’t seem to have worked out (on the pitch). I’d be happy to have him back but who knows.
Your estimate of the result is a little kind to us. You have a very fine side this year. I assume you’ll rest a few and the it depends where our team’s collective head is at. I hope we put a few on the score sheet but suspect you’ll get into the high 30s- mid 40s. All the best.

Crikey that’s not a bad squad there Bongser. I think the result is a foregone conclusion but I hope that London give it a go and create some opportunities. Season in slight danger of fizzling out for us. For you I suspect it’s about avoiding injuries and just keeping ticking over and not losing focus. Play offs seem a long way away for Broncos at present but you never know.

O/T

Big Time, you interacted with Budge earlier and it summoned something from Bongser's fevered memory palace:

BT ran a series of adverts back in the 70s/80s with a muscly budgie called Buzby(?)

Cheers BT & Budge, Bongser just reclaimed a little of his life!

Voiced by Bernard Cribbins IIRC.

Dixon was up for a 12 game ban for using unacceptable language (grade f) not sure what happened.

That won’t help. I was always pleased to see him in our team ....except when he occasionally did that step hard to the right as the attacker brushes past his left shoulder and over the line to score move.
I also thought he seemed a good guy off the pitch so I hope if he does pick up a ban it’s not too long.

His defence is indefensible - Leigh have signed well since but that first factor weighed heavily against him.

Regarding your last line, yeah, was impressed by seeing him, when on loan at Rochdale, in the Leigh dressing room after a win (in a Centurions outer coat whilst that night's players were in varying amounts of game kit) banging the empty Eski cum cajon to lead the victory song. If he has two brain cells to rub together, he must have known he'd played his last game for us but he was still one of the lads when amongst his squadmates.

Is "squadmate" a word? It is now!

It doesn’t look like the foot is coming off the gas:

Aekins
Ferguson
Chamberlain
MacDonald
Inu
Lam
Mellor
Sidlow
Smith
Amone
Wardle
Stone
O’Donnell

Ipape
Charnley
Ioane
Nakubuwei

33/1 Broncos to win. Worth a punt? I've only seen Leigh once and they lost. 1/500 Leigh to win mind!

Well beaten. Shows how far we are from where we need to be.

Based on the ones around me, if there was a championship for whinging fans, Leigh would take that comfortably too.

Some observations from me.
Leigh’s interchange bench is dynamite.
Their back room staff is significant in number they really must have a few quid knocking about. Was that Gary Megson ex WBA manager as a water carrier?
Leigh were metaphorically a different class but I thought Broncos worked hard.
A bit unlucky to have a try knocked off and had a decent 15 minutes in the first half but that was probably about it.
Boy does Inu take a long time to take even the simplest of kicks,
We only had one drop out today and, to sighs around the ground, Leyland did his 15 metres short kick offf.....and it worked and we got up the other end of the park before gifting Ferguson with a break away interception try.
Walker takes the kick offs. He is perilously close to hitting it too long most times- can’t win can you!
Parata had his least effective game Leigh very effective down the middle.
As to Leigh’s fans seems Ok to me but I do question quite why fans are so inter- mingled it is a recipe for disaster. I’m. Sure they could have allocated Leigh a stand. Maybe it was just too much hassle.

Tony Clubb as assistant coach seems to be enjoying the pies now his playing career is over.



Perhaps they were supposed to be in a separate section, but for all the security I don't see any checks on where you sit.

I don't dislike him.....he's probably a lovely bloke but he's ruined the club I support, which is why I post on that clubs forum.....now jog on you northern monkey


Happy we didn't get totally embarrassed by a SL standard squad, but we do look very lightweight in terms of competing for anything other than survival in 2023....we are certainly no nearer SL than we were last February.....and nowhere near the 5,000 fans that we had in 2007 when Hughes took over and he now says he needs after ignoring them for 15 years ....

Yes I noticed Clubb as well. You can see by the way he ran onto the pitch how much damage the game does to the body.

Yes from back at the start of the season when there was more security than fans there appeared to be just one on the doors of each block and one solitary guard ensuring no one ran onto the pitch. Financially shrewd move but if it kicks off they’ll struggle.
What do you think the attendance was? On the other forum someone said about 350 but I think it was more than that although the perversity of using a 9000 seat stadium and opening only one side and using only about 4 blocks in that stand is more and more obvious every time I attend. Leigh fans were in good voice, Broncos fans probably down a bit- no one likes watching their team trounced, I’d say about 700.

Haha, Bongser is guessing you saw Tom Nisbet (on loan from Saints), decent player but not getting an awful lot of game time lately, wears No5 when he does play, but Leigh have recruited heavily since the beginning of the season. 9 appearances (other than "aquaman"icon_wink.gif, 5 tries.

Good luck next week with the visit of a Barrow team that, knowing Batley are away at Leigh, will fancy nicking home advantage in the eliminators. Mind you, Dewsbury had them sweating today and London Broncos is a better team than Dewsbury.

Classy riposte, Orangeman! Bless you. Hope you and the kids are well.

Your friend, Bongser.

I'm nothing if not classy mate......twas father's day down here yesterday and whilst the UK resident child was quiet, the young Kiwi born Son treated me handsomely.....stay safe and good luck in SL 2023......let's hope you win one more game than The Wire.

He might mean the bloke who brings the kicking tee on and has been doing so for over 20 years (Sean Fairhurst) you could say he had a Gary Megson hairdo

I think your guess is likely to be the right one Budge. I can’t see the guy I was thinking having been on your playing strength for a fair few years so don’t think it was Nisbet.

I thought we played okay today, Leigh are a full time professional side and are probably paying twice as much on salaries as London. They have a squad packed with solid pro's, the kind you find filling the rosters in the lower half of SL; so they just overpowered us with brute force and general competence. But, I didn't find them to be especially skilful and I think they lack the sort of speed needed for SL. I can see Leigh coming straight back down, especially when you consider how many overseas players they are going to have to trim.

I think we can take down Barrow in the final game, and if we hold this side together we can crack the upper half of the table next season.

I prefer Cake's post match assessment that it was really poor and unacceptable. As for next season, aiming for mid table won't deliver the fans we need to make the club sustainable.

Second London try disallowed correctly but with one of those odd laws of the game, had that been given reckon it was a different game.
Leigh were not that special today, london were poor! Todays Leigh squad will lose its core of overseas players, they will struggle next year as cannot see where they are going to recruit from.
But, some poor execution from London today, dropped ball and dumb last set play. No doubt we would have still lost but by a much better score line and some pride

It's no good comparing us to Leigh, they had three international wingers in their team today, yes they were all well past their prime and wouldn't be anywhere near a top SL side, but there is a level of investment in the Leigh side that no other Championship side can match (maybe Fev can come close). RL isn't like some other sports e.g. football, where a plucky underdog can hold off a much better team, the nature of the game means that semi-pro sides just can't compete with fully pro sides unless there's something very wrong with the fully pro team. They rolled over us because they were bigger and stronger and they can play consistently at a higher tempo. It's not a disgrace to be beaten when it's such a mismatch.

At the start of the season London were a shambles, the last tackle play, if it ever came, was for Moceidreke to hoof it randomly in the air. But with a few key signings in the spine we now attempt some half decent plays, yes we are one dimensional, and yes we lack true quality, but there is competency, shape, structure and patterns, even if there's no plan B, C, D etc...there is at least something resembling plan A, and that makes us competitive against most teams in this division.

I've given up on the myth of 'sustainability', I don't worry about the magical 5k average (I remember hearing this direct from Nic Cartwright's mouth in the bar at The Stoop in 2006), we need to be competitive in this division, and play some attractive RL that will appeal to RL fans in the South East catchment area. Barring a game or two a season I pretty much gave up when we moved to the Hive, and I thought I'd made a mistake coming back this season, but I've enjoyed what I've seen in the second half of the season. We want people seeing competitive, entertaining games, don't worry about SL. If I were the club I'd flood the local area with £5 ticket deals for the Barrow game, we can play entertaining stuff, even if it's not technically great.

I felt London put in a good effort today. Leigh were big, strong and had depth. First try after 3 minutes and I thought the pasting was underway. A minute before halftime London scored under the posts to effectively make it 12-18. But it was disallowed and Leigh went down the pitch to make it 6-24 instead. Would still have lost convincingly, but 12-18 at half time would have looked very good.

The last 30 minutes were tough. Leigh's last three tries were all scored on the final play of a set. Two towering kicks to our left flank followed by a kick through the middle.

The match today was a far better performance by London than some of the early season embarrassments. Still can't believe how poor that Newcastle performance was.

It feels more like we need some quality signings next season rather than quantity. Don't see anybody in today's 17 (no Wellington today) who has to be ditched (and there are some from earlier in the season) although some will need to drop to squad members rather than the matchday 17.