Yes,managed it four times.

I wouldn't say Cardiff was a tourist hotspot but people worked round that by staying in South Wales or as i did for one of the Challenge cup finals down there stopped in Bristol and got the train in. So by getting the north east tourist board involved (Ive have seen the t.v advert) that would help.

Wherever the next location is to be, it doesn't have to be chosen on which city is the greatest up! True, lots of people enjoy this part, but the whole concept wasn't thought of so that we can have an excuse for a lads weekend away. The idea behind it all is to take the game on the road and have a show piece event outside the heartlands of RL and to promote the game and give other people the chance to sample our product.

Of course there are lots of people who wish to get tanked up, and so places such as Dublin are being mentioned. But on the other side of things, there are lots of fans like me who do not look for a good old drink and simply want to watch the rugby. If Dublin is chosen, it almost certainly cuts out fans such as me, whereas somewhere like Newcastle makes it a definite for me and fans of my sort. Dublin is straight away a £200 plus (even more if you take family) trip as opposed to a "fill up the car with juice and off you go" trip to Newcastle. I attend 99.9% of all Cas games, with the usual CC final, Grand final and a few international fixtures chucked in every season. Yet out of four magic weekends i have only made [ione[/i day trip to Cardiff. Yes i could have driven to Cardiff again and Murrayfield twice, but personally i chose to keep my money in my pocket for once.

A big factor with myself and i guess some other families is that RL takes up lots of weekends. Not everyone in my household like to go to the rugby all the time and so when another £200 plus weekend pops up i usually end up spending that £200 on my other family members and doing something with them for a change. So as i say, for people like me places such as Dublin will be write off in my RL calender whereas somewhere closer to home such as Newcastle or Birmingham will have my support all the way. The RL have to remember not to cast off fans like me when they chose the next venue otherwise they'll be scratching their heads as to why they only get 25,000 fans each day.

Here here Marshy

my 2 pence is Would it not be better if we had the event as a season opener, Most fans miss there Rugby while the close season is on so would jump at the chance to visit a stadium and see all SL teams 1st w-end of season .
Newcastle also get my vote but a football stadium during the season might be a big ask!!

Problem with doing it at start of the season is Finances.

the new season starts in february which means if you have an opening weekend event when would you have to book hotels etc. Possibly January even December. Not sure about you but i am normally skint in those two months what with presents and paying the impending credit card.

south of france / northen spain ?

It's just a shame Villa Park is 30 minutes from Birmingham City Centre on public transport... people complain about Murrayfield being too far away from the centre of Edinburgh

The concept is good, but how cold would that be. Cold enough to put me off sitting all day. No ta.

Maybe I'm in a minority of 1, but I think that the whole concept is unfair, as individual teams may or may not get a difficult game. It's OK if you win like we did this time, but adding another random game for teams that may have lots of injuries cannot be justified. We were lucky that we got Catalan at a time that they are not in good form and have lost players, but what if we had got one of the top 4 teams and got thumped, making our points difference even worse and picking up even more injuries!

This is also true of any other round of games.

I think an even fixture list (i.e. everyone plays each other home and away) would increase the arguments against having the playoffs, which have arguably become a very popular aspect of each campaign and maintain interest and competition throughout.

If they could find a way so that teams ended up playing the team next to them in the table at that time, so 1v2, 3v4... Problem is the organisation in not knowing which team will be in which position until a week before and so not knowing whose playing on each day.

Also I can't see any football clubs wanting seven matches played on their pitch at any time of the year.

I am not against the play-off system because teams who run into form late in the season may have a good go at it, eg, Catalans, but adding another round of league games on the false premise of spreading the game to other ares, when in truth it is all just about making money is not fair to the clubs on a number of levels. The only positive I can see is the publicity gained by Sky advertising it as a spectacular event, but even that is negated by the empty seats seen during their TV coverage.
Not even the NRL (who we copy the play-off system from) are daft enough to think that this is a viable concept.

You are aware that we had play-offs before the Australians even had rugby league?

Quite correct. In the early days of Rugby League when travel across the Pennines was a major consideration, most games would be played within the same county with very few being played inter-county. This gave an imbalance of fixtures - look at early tables which contained 30+ teams who only played 30-odd games in season - which was resolved with the use of the play-off system.

As i said I am not against the play off system, it's the addition of another random game that I disagree with. What sense does it make to play just one of the other teams three times in the season and play the rest twice and we already have the Callenge cup final plus the Grand Finals to show case the game. At least the teams playing in these have earned their big day out.