Possibly the worst idea I've ever read on these boards.

So where will be the central point by which you determine east and west?

Castleford is west of Hull.. so do they come under 'west' or 'east'?

Bradford looks pretty central... so are they classed as east or west?

Warrington is east of Wrexham... yet its west of Leeds

In the spirit of being pendantic. There should be no Yorkshire representative team either, since in 1974 Yorkshire ceased being an unified county in its own right.

So, you would have technically the following counties in the present day; West Yorkshire where most ex-Yorkshire teams are based, plus Hull FC/KR from East Riding Of Yorkshire. Those counties being distinct from one another and no way connected in any modern official sense.

Put it this way, in a hypothetical situation, where Merseyside and Lancashire were at war with each other. I would defer and help kick its backside back into the mersey.

If you use the left hand side of your brain this will tell you West is predomitely Cumbria, Lancashire, Cheshire and Wales, whilst swopping over to the right hand side of your brain this will tell you East giving you Yorkshire, London Area.

If we want to have proper representative rugby at county/origin level then it needs to be persisted with. SOO in Oz only had 1 game in 1980 and 81. Even after that the crowds weren't consistently large. It's only in the early 90's that crowds regularly reached over 30,000 for every game.[url=http://www.nswrl.com.au/default.aspx?s=soo_historySource[/url

Now look at it, arguably the biggest sporting series in Oz which admittedly is never something we could achieve here with wendyball as predominant sport and others ahead in terms of TV coverage etc.

I personally would love to see our game doing this at least to the same intensity as high level Super League games on an annual basis. Maybe it would then give us an opportunity to compete with the Australians, hell maybe even PNG

County games need to be persisted with, and allowed to grow as a meaningful fixture as has been said.

People harp on about poor crowds, but I remember the last game played at Headingly in these fixtures, 12000 midweek. If thats not a good crowd - again for a midweek, meaningless fixture, then what do you want?

Slot in in the weekend for Magic Weekends (which havent been allowed to prove themselves yet, we get one bad weekend in the worst recession in generations and people want to call it a failure) and give it the billing and marketing full bore and its a winner.

but then again, RL fans on the main want to seem to call things a failure before they've started, its a wonder we made it this long.

And here lies the crux of the problem.

Who pays for this event?

At the moment we have an event which the RFL "sells" the rights to a particular city's tourist board, using some of that money to subsidise ticket prices. Now you're proposing to replace that event with something that the RFL can't sell (as, presumably, we'll be keeping it in our back yard) and where the game's core audience is being admitted free of charge.

If we're going along this route my take would be to make it "us" vs everyone else. Therefore if the match was in Yorkshire it would be Yorkshire vs the best of the rest of SL. If in Lancashire it would be Lancashire vs.....etc etc with a varying home venue generating the home side....so France and Wales could be added to the party (as could Cumbria).

We should have a game using proper, traditional boundaries. Britannia inferior vs Britannia Superior, or Northumbria v Mercia.

Thats not a bad idea actually.

We had county games pretty much every season from 1895 through until the early eighties. I remember watching a couple with crowds below the 1000 mark in the 1970s.

There has to come a point when you accept that most people aren't interested.

I reckon we would be too tempted to write it off as a failure when it doesn't turn into a SOO affair in the first year.

My idea with Lancs and Yorks is to start them again as opposition for France (and maybe Wales). It would give France more competetive fixtures which would help their developement and give us two trail games were a few other potential players can have a crack of the whip.

If these fixtures were going on (which I think would be well received by fans on both sdes of the pennines), each county's performances would start to ask questions about which side was better, thus maybe creating a real clamour for the lancs vs yorks fixture to be scheduled.