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It is rugby league’s very own version of Cool Runnings – 50 Jamaican athletes attending a trial for a Canadian team that will play in England.

Toronto Wolfpack will compete in League One next season as the first professional transatlantic sports team ever, and their extensive search for talent has already taken in Philadelphia and Tampa in the USA.

Now attention has turned to the Caribbean, looking at players hailing from Jamaica’s amateur league, athletics clubs and tough local neighbourhoods.

Former Great Britain coach and Wolfpack director of rugby Brian Noble has overseen the trials, and believes there is a wealth of untapped talent.

“It’s been an awesome ­experience,” Noble told Mirror Sport.

“To have 50 players turn up at the prospect of a road trip to Canada, via the UK, has been pretty humbling.

“We haven’t much ­equipment – half a dozen balls, some tackle shields and cones. But these guys are unbelievable athletes and have absolutely smashed each other at the trials.

“You don’t realise the work that is going on over here – there are guys who are true ­missionaries for the sport.

"There’s a lot of talent and these guys are hungry, some walked miles to get to the trials or caught three buses.”

Noble - who took time out to experience the ultimate trailblazing path of a Jamaican bobsleigh - intends to try and find English clubs for players that don’t make the Wolfpack’s final squad.

At the end of Toronto’s five-stop bus tour, which is being filmed for a documentary, they will take around 15 players back to England to play a trial match against an amateur club.

And Noble expects there to be some Jamaicans among them.

He added: “Some of them have had difficult up bringings, but rugby league can take them out of a circle of violence and give them a new focus.

“We held a beach party after the trials, and 20 or 30 of them turned up early to play rugby on the beach first.

“It was quite the contrast - you had this beautiful sunset and then all these great kids smashing into each other.

“Some of them have difficult life stories, and seeing them walking to the trial and giving everything to play a game of rugby league took me back to my youth.

“Everybody out there is playing the game for the right reasons.”

In the 1993 film comedy Cool Runnings, John Candy scours Jamaica to put together a ­Winter Olympics bobsleigh team.