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.