Quote: El Diablo "I thought about this randomly last night. The one assumption that has gone largely unchallenged through this is that the local populations are too small to support separate clubs in Cas and Wakey. Is that really true though? Surely Cas is a club built on the power it had to draw an obscenely large percentage of it's local community into the ground. What happened to that? Can it be recaptured? There are 40k people in Cas (give or take), another 30k or so in Ponte Carlo. 80k in Wakey, then places like Normanton etc. With no football league clubs, and all that heritage is it really impossible to get 20k or so regular punters through 2 sets of turnstiles?
Granted it isn't happening at the moment, but could the imagination of those communities be re-captured? Or have times moved on too much?
I have a sense that Wakey's fan base may have been a little more disenchanted and drifted a little further, but surely as a sport we should at least make a push to get those fans back before we write them off?
There are parallels in other sports where relatively small populations have been rallied behind a sports club. Lens, Hoffenheim and Green Bay spring to mind. Obviously very different contexts, but that's OK, we need smaller numbers and much smaller revenues than they do.
Just a thought.'"
When was the last season that Castleford and Wakefield averaged >10k a game during a season? has it ever actually happened? We need to be realistic about what is possible