Hello, this is The Ruck, the journalist's rugby podcast from The Times and the Sunday Times.

Welcome along. I'm Alfie Reynolds in studio on a Monday once again with Will. Hello, I'm back. You're back from the north. Well, it is the north. Hold that thought. We'll get back to that in just a moment because also alongside Will is Alex. Alex. Hello. All right, Alex. Hello. Good little trip to America. You've been away, I went to town, yeah, last week, well, the weekend before last I was in Tampa Bay,

and then this weekend I was in Coventry.

Similar.

Tampa Bay, which is the south of America.

Yeah, family get together in Tampa Bay, my sister, family live out there, went to some baseball,

went to the beach, went to a big Premier League fan fest event, which was wicked. And then this weekend went to watch the Old Northamptonian 3rd 15 in their end of season away day at Old Wheatleyans for a grassroots feature, which was class, like just everything you want from a grassroots day out of the rugby. It was wicked. Oh, awesome. Awesome. Well, the reference to the north for those that aren't sure on last week's pod, Will said that he was in Derbyshire in the north, to which Charlie Morgan immediately said, hang on, I'm not letting you get away of that. And we said to the listeners, let us know, is Darbyshire in the north. And Jeremy emailed the Ruck at the times.com.com. at UK and he said the RFU's East Midlands regional side is Notts, Lincolnshire and Derbyshire. So, Derbyshire is East Midlands. When you're driving up the M1. It's going to double down. There is a big sign that says two words, the north. And where is that? I don't know, but it's sort of not that way. But yeah, well, yeah. Well, there we go. It's north from where I usually live. And it was gorgeous. It was lovely. The Hope Valley was shining. I did a big walk. It did all these people who did the marathon on Sunday, I walked that distance on Friday, lads. So, you know, I didn't put that on Instagram. Oh, wait, no, sorry, I did. The Hope Valley is where they tested the dam buses, yeah. So the Bansford bombers are the local football team. And they've got the, like, flying plane over the dam as their emblem. So good. Well, let me try and close that that kind of worms for now,

shall we?

Definitely enough.

Where Derbyshire is.

Coming up on the pod, Elgin is going to be joining us to chat about the Women's

Six Nations.

He was at Ashton Gate for the England-Wales game.

We will review the prayer and we'll look ahead to Bath's trip to Bordeaux.

But to start off, interesting story at the back end of last week. We wanted

to start with this, the British and Irish Lions, the possibility of them touring France, Argentina,

Japan, something like this. So this news broke that the Lions are looking at the possibility of

expanding where they possibly tour away from the traditional rotation of South Africa, New Zealand,

Australia. Now, my immediate thought was this was the France thing was bubbling away just before we all went on the Lions tour last year.

And when we put that to the Lions CEO, Ben Calvilley, is very good at saying, well, we look at all possibilities and not really telling you anything.

Has this progressed at all from that point?

Of course, the Lions will look at all from that point of court?

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