It was a journey of six hours and a round trip of nearly seven hundred miles as the London Broncos headed to the northwest to take on Whitehaven RLFC in the second round of the 2023 Betfred Championship with both sides seeking their first two points of their 2023 campaign after opening week losses.

Alex Bishop withdrew from the home side´s line-up after the early warmup which forced coach Jonty Corley to make several small adjustments to his side, Mike Eccles was able to start the game with his chosen seventeen.

Super League may have been marketing the Easter programme as a "Rivals Round", but all eyes were on the Championship on Sunday evening when Workington Town travelled to Whitehaven for a traditional Cumbrian derby in their second meeting of the year.

Town - promoted from League 1 last year - made the trip firmly rooted to the foot of the table and still looking for their first win of the season, while their hosts were three places above them with two wins from seven games.

Coach Chris Thorman was brutally honest and admitted that the squad he'd brought up from League 1, and assembled since promotion, "wasn't good enough".

He had added two loan players to the line up, while stressing he has "faith" in his group of players.

There were whoops of joy in Whitehaven when they were drawn at home in the Betfred Challenge Cup against the cup holders St Helens, tempered by the knowledge that they had a snowball´s chance in hell of progressing through to the quarter finals.

Despite their being twenty places between them in the league structure, St Helens reacted to last weeks defeat in Toulouse by putting out a very strong side to make sure that there were no mistakes in their quest for a place at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and the showpiece final.

Whitehaven were given a fifty-four point start on the coupon and many of the five thousand of so packed into the Recreation Ground were hoping that their Marras side would be able to put up more of a fight or the most optimistic among them even dare to hope for one of the biggest cup upsets of all time.

Surprise play-off package Whitehaven came into their game against the heavily fancied Halifax Panthers on the back of some scintillating form.

Despite Halifax ending the season in third and Whitehaven in sixth there was very little to choose between the two sides over the duration of the regular season with honours shared in the two regular rounds games, Whitehaven winning the most recent meeting just a fortnight ago.

Halifax were the favourites for the win, and to secure a game against Featherstone Rovers next weekend having been given a six point handicap on the coupon, but Whitehaven knew that they were more than capable of springing a surprise which would see them booking their flights to Toulouse.

The potential for complacency was Widnes Vikings worst enemy coming into today’s Challenge Cup second round fixture against Whitehaven as the cup kings of the seventies and eighties took on a side who have never made it to Wembley and who are looking forward to their first season back in the Championship after gaining promotion in 2019.

The bookies couldn’t see past the win for Simon Finnigan’s side who had done well to knock out the Dewsbury Rams in the last round a week ago.

Matt Cook and Paul Clough were making their first appearances for the Vikings and despite no fans being in the ground the home advantage, and i-pitch, would certainly count in their favour.

The two newly promoted sides to the Betfred Championship, neither if whom having had the best of starts to their 2020 season, met at the Recreation Ground in Whitehaven for a four-pointer at the wrong end of the table as Oldham were the visitors.

Both sides have started the season with two losses but knew a win would lift them towards the middle of the early season table, a loss though would leave either side anchored to the bottom moving into round four.

The second round of the Kingstone Press Championship saw Whitehaven host the Toronto Wolfpack and hoping that they could do better than London Skolars effort last weekend.



The weather conditions had been awful all day and with the pitch already looking a little worse for wear the hopes weren't great for a game of open rugby.