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JonM

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Posts posted by JonM

  1. 5 hours ago, EggFace said:

    I'm talking about this year and do hope the Gold Coast will get some better support....St.George at Kogarah yes your right but so wrong about St.George at Wollongong as 16,000 plus at Win at the weekend just need mire games in the Gong.

    Plenty of 8000 crowds at Wollongong last season.  If you exclude the games played at country venues (Cairns, Bundaberg, Mudgee etc) four of the ten lowest NRL crowds last season were at Wollongong and two more were at Kogarah.

    • Like 1
  2. 10 hours ago, EggFace said:

    Who cares the NRL is doing very well apart from Gold Coast.

    Gold Coast who averaged over 19K home attendance last season? If you're picking a laggard in terms of attendances, St. George is clearly the one to go for, particularly home games in Wollongong, although Kogarah isn't much better.

    • Like 1
  3. 13 minutes ago, doc said:

    Widnes lost to Sheffield in 1989 , after the WCC game. Sheffield then went on about it for years after!

    I remember that game very well. Arrived about 2 hours before kick-off, no-one there to take my money, so just wandered into the ground. Saw the state of some of the Widnes players and knew we were going to get beaten. Also remember thinking that Kurt Sorensen's arms were about the same size as Jonathan Davies's legs.

  4. 2 minutes ago, N2022 said:

    So, let me guess, Aus still hold it, and it's the risk of losing the Courtney Goodwill Trophy that's the reason the international schedule is pretty much non-existent.

    That's a good opportunity to remind ourselves that Australia's most recent game was a 30 points to 0 defeat against New Zealand 🙂

    • Like 1
  5. 1 hour ago, Keith989 said:

    13k for Gold Coast seems very generous. 

    How so?  It's less than 50% of the capacity at Robina, of course, and down on last season's average of 17K.

    11 214 for Warrington v Catalan. Thought the Saturday afternoon KO and BBC coverage might've reduced that - seems like a pretty decent attendance.

    • Like 2
  6. 58 minutes ago, Eddie said:

    I understand why you’re saying that but it clearly isn’t the case in FA cup replays and never has been, in football short notice isn’t a problem so in theory it shouldn’t be in RL either. 

    Football has a far bigger pool of potential supporters. If you have 50% of fans who can't make it, there's plenty more to replace them. We don't have that. And even there, cup games are not as well supported as regular league fixtures.

  7. 53 minutes ago, Sports Prophet said:

    There is evidence to back that theory. You only have to look at the play-off series of years gone by and the more often than not sub par crowd figures.

    A point I've made many times on here. It's not the pricing or the competition structure. Arranging games at short notice means a significant chunk of the audience cannot go. A reasonable proportion of people with jobs or families or other commitments simply can't or won't be able to attend on a random day and time. League fixtures are there in the calendar months ahead and can be planned for. Cup games and play-offs aren't. We don't have too many postponed games these days, but when we do, the re-arranged games often suffer crowdwise for the reason.

    • Like 1
  8. 4 minutes ago, Gerrumonside ref said:

    I just don’t see what the emotional attachment to England RL is for younger fans and we tend to see this reflected in attendance levels that feed into venue choices that becomes a vicious cycle.

    At least in cricket there’s some happy Ashes winning, One Day World Cup final drama to cling onto for people under a certain age plus a new aggressive playing style.

    In football we are reaching the latter stages of tournaments on a frequency that even qualifying is seen as a cruise and people’s debate is mainly that we are not succeeding in style.

    As a child, I saw GB lose to Australia in 1978, a drawn home series vs NZ in 1980, a thrashing from the Aussies in 1982, some tv coverage of us losing to both Australia & NZ away in 1984, another drawn home series against NZ in 1985, another beating from the Aussies in 1986. First time I saw us beat the Aussies was 1988, early morning TV, third test in Sydney -  Henderson Gill, Mike Gregory, Phil Ford and Martin Offiah. No world cup for most of that period too. So I don't think it was success on the field that formed the attachment for our generation.

    We had 8000 kids watching England women vs Brazil 18 months ago, one of the most enjoyable RL experiences of my life. Predictably, the RFL appear to have done nothing to follow up on that.

    • Like 3
  9. Thinking some more about this, I'd also add Oldham v Featherstone in the 2nd division Premiership Final at Old Trafford. Oldham 22 - 0 up, then Rovers then staged a brilliant fight back to lead 26 - 22, only for Des Foy to find a gap from nowhere and pass it to the support to level the scores. Easy kick to win, but the Oldham player scuffed it and it just scraped over the bar. Remember that much more clearly than Widnes beating Hull (or Bradford, I forget which year it was) straight afterwards. 

    Saints v Bradford 19-18 in the 2002(?) Grand Final was another cracker.

     

  10. 25 minutes ago, Gerrumonside ref said:

    Just feels like all those great memories of international rugby league being a focal point are not shared by a younger generation that has more loyalty to club over country.

    I don't think it's.a generational thing. Hard for anyone to get much of an attachment for a team that plays so infrequently. The England soccer team (and England Women's soccer team) are much higher profile today than they were in the past. Same thing in cricket - it's all about the national team.

    • Like 2
  11. 44 minutes ago, Phil W said:

    If what we have to do as England Is starting somewhere with a European Championships and build it then so be it. But waiting and waiting can't go on.

    Realistically though, that is a multi-decade project. France has around 70-80 amateur clubs, they are not going to be competitive with England unless something pretty dramatic happens. Below that you're on to the likes of Wales, Serbia, Greece, Czechia with maybe 8-10 amateur clubs. 

    • Like 1
  12. 1 minute ago, marklaspalmas said:

    That's a surprisingly acceptable list over 20 years. Far from ideal, but still.

    Difficult to reconcile this list with the idea in my head that we seem to have seen very little of Eng/GB v Australia in the past decade or so.

    You're not wrong.

    England last played Australia in England at the London Stadium in the 2016 Four Nations. The previous meeting in *England* was in the 2011 Four Nations. We've gone from three games here on an Ashes tour every four years to a game once a decade.

    • Like 4
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