M62 motorway

Or, from this Merseyside vantage point...

The mayor along the M62.

He set up shop in a corner of the Hilton Hotel, just beyond the perimeter of the official proceedings.

Senior figures invited for an audience, a glimpse of an imagined alternative future for Labour.

So w- what's your sort of early assessment of Liverpool and Manchester United? Two different projects, but two fan bases currently that are putting each manager and each project under a little bit of heat.

Yeah, let's work my way from west to east along the, uh, along the M62, starting at Liverpool.

I mean, Iraola is such a good coach.

I mean, I, I had probably about 90 seconds to two minutes in his control room once at, at Bournemouth when he was there in with the coaches, and I'd just taken in just to sort of be introduced to him.

But do not worry, he gives us a phone call and gives us a trick of the trade.

Then me and Ben have a riveting conversation about the M62.

Ben plays fancy dress for a Jane Austen weekend and we do a brand new commission impossible.

It's definitely going to get made.

But we did your drive to Leeds, didn't we? You did.

You did my daily commute.

And there is a problem at the moment on the M62, which is a thing that I like to call the night closures.

And when you are starting work at circa 4am, you can't really avoid the night closures.

Yeah, we took 1,300 to Castleford, 1,200 to Huddersfield and 1,100 to York and 900 to Leeds on a Friday night.

So we're certainly going to beat that to go to Wigan another week, and we've got probably double that with the buses going across the M62.

Yeah, but why not? I'm not sure about changes.

It depends if Goula doesn't play, then you put Mike in the front row, you bring Lipovic back off the bench and put Harvey on the bench again.

We'll go back to how you quantify if last year was a good year.

But I've noticed that on the M62 at the moment there's a lot of banners saying, this is our time.

Is Super League and the sport in a position to capitalise on last year? Are we ready to move to the next level?

Yeah of course I think last year at this stage we really wanted to make sure that the new structure was a success and that I think if you like some of the fans who probably had started to drift in their interest in the sport through 11, 12, 13, 14 came back and I think when you look at any measure they did.

I think in some ways it's, you know, It's frustrating, I think, in particular John Dutton, who's Tournament Director, because he wants to get those venues nailed down.

If I was looking at the positive side of it, it's because we've actually got choices to make now.

And that's something, when I started at the RFL in 2009, when we chose the venues for that year's Four Nations, we were price takers and we just picked six venues or four venues on the M62 and that was it.

But now because of the success of the World Cup, because England's growing, because Super League's had a great year, you've got venues all around the country saying, think about us, think about us.

I suppose, first of all, Liam, I have to ask, which teams do you support?

Oh, you've landed me right in it there, Matt, because I am in Liverpool, but I am not originally from Liverpool, so I am more affiliated with the team at the other end of the M62, but I can't believe I've just admitted that on national radio.

At least it means you're an honest broker.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But they, they produce a, a lot of very good players out of Yorkshire.

The problem is as well though, Bill, you've got the M62, which is the corridor of Rugby League.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, and everywhere you go there it's Rugby League, Rugby League, Rugby League.

Yeah.

And, you know, it's good to watch as well, and you can understand it and, and I think one of the things was more of a working area, working class area on the M62, and I think people s- uh, well, not so much now, but used to associate Rugby Union as being the, the, the toffs.

Yeah.

This is just an example of one of our stations.

This is Warrington, um, it's the M62 motorway, Liverpool to the west, Manchester to the east.

Uh, and this is just a, I think, a good example, uh, of what a-- what one of our stations looks like, but also how, uh, what we've, you know, taken twelve years to build basically is now starting to, to mature.

Uh, Warrington, uh, refuels north of three hundred trucks, um, a day, dispenses here, uh, north of, um, eight thousand tons of biomethane, uh, per annum, and is, um, now in a, in a roughly fifty percent, slightly more fifty percent utilization, um, and can then go up to north of six hundred trucks, um, a day.

Excellent.

Yeah, so I'm from Hull, so I'm from the other side of the M62, so Hull in East Yorkshire.

When I was growing up, everybody in the city, because it's a massive rugby league city, it's got two top-flight rugby league clubs, Hull KR and Hull FC, so...

Most people were into rugby and if you did like football, no one really knew about Hull City, if I'm being quite honest.