I didn't use the park and ride so can't comment.

The weather was great, I have no idea what you are talking about. The irony is, you're a Rovers fan. Ever been to Craven Park?!

Beer was £3.50 where we was, which to be fair was a rip off. But that's event prices for you.

I would like to say the following improvement!

£2.50 a pint or bottle, would have kept the fans in the ground!

True. But where do you get £2.50 pints these days? Probably fair to say you do get some pubs but these are by and large small suburban outlets (or whetherspoons ).

You wont get any city centre pubs, or stadiums outlets where you can get anything under £3. I'd have thought £3 is pretty reasonable for a pint but that £3.50 is to be expected at stadia.....?

Even Warrington on a saturday night you can pay that in places

I was not trying to question the RFLs ability to add and subtract. I am just questioning the logic/ethics of comparing an attendance two years ago rather than last year (the usual choice). All for the purpose of claiming that the, quote "Magic Weekend crowd grows" and the event was a success justifying the move to Edinburgh. The former is not true and the later is very disputable.

The RFL will not compare the second years attendance figures with next years event. They will compare this years as they are lower.

Why could they have not said "Encouraging" rather than "Grows".

Using such logic just makes us look foolish.



Hmmmm Good answer. Maybe I am wasted in my job.



My thoughts exactly. OK you would suspect that Celtic probably did not affect the attendance figure too much but Salford would have. Also the RFL had introduced season ticket discounts making attending both days more attractive. This should have resulted in an increase on the 2008 figure. It also means that it is likely the gate money is down as the average fans ticket price will have decreased.

The argument for the event is worth £10m.
They miss "to the local economy" bit at the end quite a bit. The RFL get significantly less and the clubs, from what I have been told, receive nothing.

The average RL fan does not have a lot of disposable cash. Surely the RFL can think of better ways for us to spend our money than giving it to overpriced hotel chains, Virgin Rail and the owners of Man City.

I did enjoy the weekend but I have done the long weekend Edinburgh and am unsure if I will return next year. They will have to offer something significantly different to get me (and I suspect a number of other people) up their next year.

The failure to increase the attendance on last year would also indicate that there were few locals at the event. Which was one of the negative comments said about Cardiff when they announced the move.

All I ask is for marketing and innovation to replace spin and groundless optimism.

True I did not find the price of the food and drink too bad but the quality was not great. Cardiff was better in that way.

You want to try living in Ireland mate - standard money for a pint is 5 euro - more like 7 in Dublin and other cities.

Add to that the additional 295 Euro per month tax I have to pay after our last budget and £3.80 sounds like a bargain to me!!!

They reckon that 10% of the crowd were locals.

That's a crowd of 6000 for a place that doesn't even have a team!

If there were 14 teams + Edinburgh then on average each team contributed 3857 speccies whereas Edinburgh / locals contributed 6000.

Seems it was therefore probably better supported by locals than pretty much by fans of most of the individual clubs.

Put that in yer pipe and smoke it.

Thing is though, I've just watched Boots N All this week. Angela's report at the begining says there were no posters or any advertising for the event in the town and locals when asked had no idea that there was even anything going on. Ball badly dropped by the RFL there I think

Then I put it to you that Angela Powers "research" for the weekend is about on par with her "what is the best stadium in SL and I'm going to skew the results so its the team I support" articles a couple of years back.

How do they get in with the millions of KR fans?

They always let the polar bears in first, because someone told them they're sitting on a mint.

To be fair, she was spot on with that. Other than the fans wandering round with shirts on, there was absolutely no evidence whatsoever in the city that a major event was on. There should have been billboards, posters, info points selling tickets and merchandise, maybe even a fanzone. But there was nothing.

I was impressed with the weekend, thoroughly enjoyed it, Edinburgh isnt as cheap a city as Cardiff, its a tourist hot spot, possibly, second after London in the UK, and thats why things where a little more expensive.

Simply put a great time , but would prefer to see all derbies if possible.