Yes you are wrong. You've quoted Metropolitan counties, which are simply an amalgamation of MBC's who agree to pool resources. The proper county palatine was an area ruled by an hereditary nobleman possessing special authority and autonomy from the rest of the kingdom. These are the official recognised counties. There's no way Wigan is in Manchester. St Helens however, is definitely in Merseyside, except for Haydock Park.

Wigan is in Lancashire and Gtr Manchester. They are not 2 separate places like some assume.

Any curtain raiser to the Exiles game should be the England Knights against France imo. I dont see any place in the current fixture calendar for a Lancs-Yorks game and tbh i dont really think there is much call for one.

Does this only apply to players who were born outside one of those counties? Kevin Sinfield made his pro debut for Leeds, but was born and raised in Oldham, but he played for Lancs last time we did this.

I miss the ROses matches, but I don't think they were commercially successful enough for us to be seeing them again soon. Shame as I'd much prefer it to the Exiles game. Yorkshire v Lancashire at least means something to me.

Isn't Cheshire still a different county though?

Aye it only applies for players born outside Lancs or Yorkshire. I remember the last time it was played a young winger from London Broncos turned out for Lancs (his name has gone).

An example of a Lancashire player who made his first team debut for a Yorkshire club we could pick this time would be Kallum Watkins. He's a Salford lad iirc.

I can't help thinking that might be a bit out of date....

Fair enough. Makes sense really.

Traditional County Boundaries have never changed, map not out of date.

Depending where you live you can use more than one "county" in your address, the actual county your town is in or the administrative area that provides your services. So a Warringtonian can say they're in Cheshire or Lancashire, but their official county is Lancashire.

That map has Windermere (the lake) in Lancashire but it is in Westmorland.

Absolutely right, it has. Here's a better map. That border should go round the bottom of Windermere.

That looks suspiciously like the Association of British Counties map.

Which is fine, except that ABC is a pressure group and has no particular right to assert that it's 1884 boundaries are any more valid or less arbitrary than the 1974 ones.

As counties were always administrative entities, and as, for an example, Lancashire has no administrative role in, say, Barrow, it seems fairly meaningless to describe Barrow as being in Lancashire. The boundaries were, in fact, officially re-drawn in 1974.

That map must be old because Coventry from that map would be in Warwickshire, but it is infact part of West Midlands

No they weren't. As the government said"The new county boundaries are solely for the purpose of defining areas of local government. They are administrative areas, and will not alter the traditional boundaries of counties, nor is it intended that the loyalties of people living in them will change."[/i