Just to pick up on your comparison with music festivals...

These kinds of things are marketed very much as "events". It's not so much who is playing at Glastonbury or Leeds/Reading or T In The Park, it's the event itself that attracts the crowds.

Rugby League simply doesn't have "events" of that kind outside the Challenge Cup final or Grand Final.

If I wanted to, I could go see each of the fixtures that were played at Millenium Magic separately when their equivalent regular season slot came around. Similarly the frequency of international games between England/Australia/New Zealand is IMO taking some of the lustre off them.

The 86 and 90 tours were special in that they marked the rebuilding of GB after the apocalypse that was 1982. It had been four years since the last tour, and they represented a rare chance for British fans to see the likes of Lewis, Meninga, Pearce etc, back in the days when all you saw of the NSWRL was a weekly highlights video from Micron if your local rental shop stocked it.

These days if you want to see Lockyer, Slater or Smith you can do so on TV every week. There's no mystery to these players any more, even less so now that you can guarantee seeing them in the flesh at least every two years without leaving the M62 corridor.

JONNY is on the spot with the travel. Saracens successfully gave tickets away to London-based fans of two London-based clubs for their Wembley RU adventures. The RFL need to give really serious thought to transport costs. Get it marketed on the M62 corridor, with cheap train fares available from across the M62 Corridor (normal routes from Manchester to Euston, Leeds/Wakey to Kings Cross and Hull Trains to Kings Cross would do it) and reasonable ticket prices and you could get this to work. Same from Wrexham and Cardiff...

It would be admirably ambitious and would require the right pricing and basically promoting the living doughnuts out of it.

I'd go, direct train to Wembley from Leamington Spa you see.... easier to get to than Leeds, in fact.

I meant, why not have the finals day there as opposed to a random international game in which England will get thumped?!

Doesn't look very good to the neutral watching England get mullered in front of a quarter full stadium!

He was a Brentford fan then?

Wembley was near to selling out for the 92 World Cup Final wasn't it? 73,631 were there according to my Rothmans.

54,569 were there in 1990 for GB versus Aus. 36,598 were there for GB versus NZ in 1993 and 57,034 for the 1st test in 94. 66,540 for the 95 World Cup final too.

From 95 onwards the crowds decline quite quickly for internationals. I think there's a few reasons for that. GB became less competitive, Aussie tours stopped happening and the tournaments in their place didn't capture the imagination. Also I think having regular access to the NRL via TV removed the mystery behind the Aussie players. The game itself also looked much more to the club game as a whole and internationals became "tagged on" rather than the culmination of what the game is about.