Just under a 1000 were free tickets and the attendance was 5,071 according the the PA.I think one of those kids doing the scores in French were French so not sure whether Toulose had a say in that.

Scott Yates is from the Academy. Flynn is a St Helens lad, not sure if he was at Saints or signed from an amateur club.

To answer the earlier questions, the kids on the PA were from local schools and were announcing scorers and interchanges in something approximating to French.

Yes both Flynn and Yates are academy lads. As were Ostick, Simm and Grady tonight. both Flynn and Yates have been superb so far this season.

The kids voice after every try was 'supposed' to be in French, announcing every try/sub etc.

Toulouse are way off the pace at the moment, I hope tonight was an eye opener for them for the rest of the season to get up to speed, they'll get better.

As for us, that's an 88-0 and a 70-0, albeit against Saddleworth and Toulouse but you can only play whats infront of you. Pretty rare for a new coach to start a job after those scorelines!

Att: 5,071. Only a few school kids in the east stand, at a guess just over 4,000 paying Widnes speccies there tonight.

An academy, community and apprenticeship scheme which have been awarded World Class status, great young players who were starting to come through in the last 2 years... and the RFL made a point of stating our home grown contribution was not upto scratch in our SL application feedback.

Laughable. It really is.

Ostick and Flynn in particular have good futures ahead of them i suspect.

Wondered what the kids announcement thing was, though they'll do well to beat the Russian announcements we had when we first played Locomotiv in 2003

I was just about to post but somebody decided to lock it after a bit of thread drift

So here goes

Very dissapointing , the lads on TV tried thier best to make excuses but if that is how they [ Toulouse ] prepare for a season in this league then thier inclusion is/will be a big mistake

Without doubt they were not ready for a SL franchise , so well done the RFL on that decision

Looking forward to seeing a proper Championship match next week from the Shay

I've cleaned this thread.

Now, it's really, really simple: we are not going to have thread about a Widnes match turned into yet another boring slanging match or re-hashing of the franchise debate.

We'll discuss the match and the match alone.

And the same thing applies to any threads in coming weeks and months about Widnes games – and about games involving Celtic, for that matter.

I'll say again, very well done tonight and you can only beat what is in front of you. You won and did that impressively enough taking most of the opportunities presented to you and created a lot through good play of your own.

It will be interesting to see how Widnes go next week against Fax as it will give a bit more of an idea of how they will get on the rest of this year. I know it is only one game but I think it will be more indicative of what test they will face week in week out. That tonight wasn't near to that.

Toulouse, I thought, were shocking. Somebody gave them credit in defense but I can't really give them too much myself. I was willing them to score near the end just to get them off the mark and up and running but it wasn't to be.

All in all good to see national league/championship back as I loved it when we used to feature on there and loved the places I visited in NL1 and NL2 and enjoyed myself so much I will definitely go back to a lot of the places as a neutral if possible.

Paddy signed from Thatto Heath

Which 30 seconds of the game was that?

Without doubt , well done