Eddie

. Try clicking on the website it suggests for them though, where you get call, directions, save, website. … or actually don’t.

On the same sort of subject, I googled Limoux Xiii to try to get on their website yesterday, the website that Google suggested was an eye opener!

Anyone know how ticket sales are going? Hopefully will be a raucous full (or close to full) house, as I’ve been telling everyone in earshot that it’s on BBC.

If GB is the stronger brand I dread to think what the attendances on the 2019 tour to NZ and PNG would have been like if the same team played as England rather than GB.

It’s just the England team sometimes playing under a different name, which doesn’t strengthen any brand imho.

We have, but if you take the most recent SL season all but one team were a few miles from the M62, it is of course still very much a Northern sport in England.

The Southern Hemisphere league failed, it’s gone from 5 to 2 countries. Also time will tell if having SA teams in the poorly supported Celtic league will work - either are shining examples of how club RL could be.

You can see the roof is made of it.

Not sure what point you’re trying to make here, it’s certainly not that Bradford’s excellent marketing in the 90s gave them 25k crowds, but it’s probably best if we leave it.

That is bizarre.

Was their average ever anywhere near 20k though, let alone 25. Iirc it was more like 15k at the peak?

Bradford were miles off 25k crowds. How would you market them to grow attendances by such a huge amount?

Why would it though, if Toulouse finish in the top 10 it will still happen, I doubt the big 5 (excl Catalans) care who else is sharing the money as long as they’re getting a bigger cut.

Agreed, a 10 team top tier is the worst idea that SL/RFL have had in a while, against some serious competition.

Fair enough Mr C, understood.

Plus one of the teams’ sets of fans wouldn’t have been watching. Even if everyone in Featherstone was watching there were 100,000 from elsewhere in the UK watching too.

It is fit for purpose, 8,000 people go to watch their games and enjoy it. I’m sure everyone at Cas would agree it should be better but building stadiums is an expensive business, you can’t just magic one out of a hat; if they stopped spending money on the team to do it they wouldn’t need a new stadium in league one.

133k for the championship GF (I can’t bring myself to call it the million pound game, it’s too twee) is superb.

Maybe, but it’s up to them to work that out?

There’s a fair few disparaging comments here, and not many positive ones. Ok I accept neither team finished last season but if they want to pay players a few quid and it helps them then so what, nobody would bat an eyelid if a tenth tier football or cricket team were paying players £50-100 a game. What we have here are two teams who are trying to get RL off the ground in new areas, I hope it goes well for them.

They probably couldn’t, but realistically they’re not going to get there any time soon.

This reminded me to try to watch some of Workington v Donny, I can’t work out how to fast forward to the start of the game though, so I’ve just got the warm ups.

Fair enough, as long as the better Southern teams got plenty of games against Heartlands teams. I don’t know what good it would go Coventry (for example) playing Swindon and Bedford most weeks, only to play a play off against Rochdale or whoever and a cup tie against Hunslet.

Ok but I meant aspiring semi pro clubs.

No, that would be the worst possible thing for RL outside of the heartlands imho. The ambitious teams (Skolars, Cov, NWC etc) need to be testing themselves against quality opposition, not amateur come and go set ups.