Rugby League: Molloy to spearhead the Giants' inaugural campaign

STEVE MOLLOY has been handed the potentially tricky role of captaining the newly merged Huddersfield-Sheffield Giants during their first Super League season.

The club's coach, John Kear, has given the Great Britain prop, outstanding for the Sheffield Eagles last season, the responsibility for leading the new outfit on the field.

"Steve has all the attributes of a good captain," Kear said. "I expect him to lead from the front and play a major part in ensuring that our game plan is carried out successfully. Our younger players are already benefiting from his work ethic."

Molloy, aged 30, has been appointed despite a groin injury which has been diagnosed as a hernia and which is likely to keep him out of the early rounds of the Challenge Cup early in the new year.

He has been given the job in the absence of two other potential candidates - the former Sheffield captain, Darren Shaw, who has joined Castleford, and Bobbie Goulding, the ex-Huddersfield skipper who is looking for a new club and has been talking to Salford.

The French Test forward, Gael Tallec, who has been released by Castleford, is to play a month's trial with Halifax.

The amateur clubs Hensingham and Featherstone Lions have been told that they must play the one outstanding Challenge Cup first-round tie on or before 4 January. The match was called off for the second time at the weekend because Featherstone's coach broke down.

The result of the second-round tie between Waterhead and Millom, abandoned after 67 minutes because of a rapidly freezing pitch with Waterhead 44- 2 ahead, will stand.

Lancashire Lynx, two places from the foot of the Northern Ford Premiership last season and the worst supported professional club in the country, have been judged to serve the best pies and burgers in the game. A survey conducted by the Oldham fanzine, Roughyed Times, put the catering at Victory Park in Chorley at the top of the league, complimenting their "thick, juicy" burgers and pies which it discovered, to its evident surprise, were "hot and full of meat".

The Rugby League Conference, the competition for clubs outside the heartland of the code, has had applications for membership in 2000 from all 20 of its members this summer. New clubs ranging from Portsmouth to Durham have also applied for places.