MOST clubs that hosted Challenge Cup matches at the weekend revealed that their crowds were well down on those for regular league games.
From looking at the figures, I would say that the Challenge Cup crowds ranged from a third to a half of the normal attendances.
This trend has been in evidence ever since we moved to summer rugby and so far the RFL has shown itself to be incapable of reversing the trend.
What we will probably have next year, however, is a pool system for something like the last 24 clubs in the Challenge Cup, most likely with eight groups of three and the winner of each group going forward into the quarter-finals of the competition.
That would mean that the clubs could add a home Challenge Cup game to their season ticket offering.
Would it solve the problem?
Well, until now the Cup has always been a straight knockout competition, although in the dim and distant past the first round used to be contested on a home-and-away basis.
There’s little doubt that such an arrangement would help with attendances, but would it damage the integrity of the competition itself?
I’m still firmly of the view that to bring the Challenge Cup Final to June, which has been done on the advice of IMG, is the wrong thing to do.
In the old days, when Rugby League was riding a wave of popularity in the 1950s, for example, the Challenge Cup Final and the old Championship Final were played on successive Saturdays and both drew enormous crowds, giving a wonderful ending to the season.
In those days the Challenge Cup was introduced in February as the season was nearing its climax and it gave teams that had little hope of making the top-four play-off a chance to compete for another trophy with all the prestige that the Challenge Cup then possessed.
It was no surprise that teams lower down the league table would raise their game considerably and we often found that clubs from the lower reaches of the competition could get to Wembley.
Perhaps the best example of that would be in 1967, when Featherstone (20th in a 30-team competition) defeated Barrow, who finished in 15th place in the league.
That would have been the equivalent last season of Halifax (20th) playing Bradford (15th) in the Challenge Cup.
The fact that such a Cup Final is unimaginable today and that very few clubs have any realistic chance of winning the competition tells us a lot about why its popularity has declined.
And that’s why it was so refreshing to see Leigh and Hull KR contesting the Cup Final last year, although we shouldn’t forget that those two clubs came fifth and fourth respectively in Super League, so we shouldn’t regard their success in reaching Wembley as a massive surprise.
