A proper commitment – Part-time Whitehaven gear up for 470-mile Cornwall trip

Part-timers Whitehaven are limbering up for rugby league’s longest domestic road trip as they prepare to face Betfred League One rivals Cornwall in Penryn on Sunday.

The cash-strapped Cumbrians will set off at seven o’clock on Saturday morning on their epic 470-mile journey, via an overnight stay at a hotel in Truro, and expect to return home in the early hours of Monday.

With stops, the one-way trip is expected to take Whitehaven the best part of 10 hours – roughly the same as the flight time from London to Las Vegas, where Wigan and Warrington showcased Super League last month.

Whitehaven were relegated from the Championship last season amid real fears the club would fail to complete the season and head coach Anthony Murray admits the club’s finances will take another untimely hit.

Murray told the PA news agency: “It will have a massive impact on the players and staff – we’re all part-time so after a late trip back on the Sunday it will be tough not to take Monday off work.

“There is considerable cost for each club to go down there, but it’s just one of those things if you want to develop the game outside the M62 corridor. It’s a proper commitment, but you accept it and get on with it.

“I’m all for it. It’s a really good weekend and the fans down there can make it quite an intimidating place. The lads get the opportunity to spend a full weekend together and feel like professionals for a few days.”

Starting with a familiar five-mile trawl up the A595 to the edge of Workington, their League One rivals who have already undertaken a slightly shorter journey, Whitehaven’s team coach – stocked with extra provisions including an off-the-record amount of beer – will have already chugged for two-and-a-half hours before it makes its first stop to pick up Murray and the club’s Lancashire-based players near Wigan.

The trip might be long enough to put Whitehaven and Cornwall in the rugby league record books, but it still falls short when it comes to ranking the longest road journey in domestic sport.

Four hundred and eighty-three miles separate Newcastle Falcons and Cornish Pirates, who met twice in rugby union’s Championship, while Penzance-based Mount’s Bay traipsed 482 miles to Tynedale in 2008 in their single season in National League Two before folding, perhaps unsurprisingly, due to debts.

The prize for the longest English sporting road trip is surely held by speedway’s Elite League, whose 2001 Premier League paired Berwick Bandits with St Austell-based Trelawny Tigers – busting the 1,000-mile round trip barrier at a cool 505 miles each way.

Nothing, however, quite compares with sport’s ultimate road trip, which was undertaken by a group of Zenit St Petersburg fans to watch their team play Luch Vladivostok in the Russian Premier League in 2006.

The fans crossed seven time zones in the course of their 6,500 mile journey and, after watching their team win 2-0, were forced to take the train home because their car had finally broken down.

They arrived just in time for the following week’s home game, whereupon they were presented with a new car and the Honda in question was put on display in Zenit’s official museum.