I expect 18000 for the wigan - leeds game and 13000 for the saints - wire game.

Leeds had sold 1,700 advance tickets and they remain on sale until 3pm today.

But these are the SEMI FINALS of our premier competition. Say what you like about Union (and I mean domestic, not International) but they sell out the equivalent games. It's not "the fans fault", that's ridiculous. I'm going, and I genuinely have no idea why its not sold out, but that's the thing - somebody who's paid to do this sort of thing needs to find out quickly why the heck our premier competition looks, to the outside world, as if even RL fans don't give much of a t**s about it.

It isn't great seeing that we haven't sold well for the Wire game too...could be just above 11k when we have averaged 14k all season.

Times are tough and finding the extra cash for these games will not be easy for many folk. And it's no use comparing us to RU when the fan demographic is pretty radically different.

I'm not sure why anyone is surprised that non-ST attendances are down when we're in the middle of the worst recession in a generation.

No, they don't. And I can guarantee if they had a similar play-off format, there would be an equally dramatic drop in attendances for them too.

Well the semi-final's last season saw Quins v Saints at Twickenham stoop get 12k (14k capacity?) and Leicester v Sarries get 20k (24k capacity?) so you're right

the capacity is unimportant, but more significantly both attendances weren't exactly much higher than their average crowd for the regular season. In Quins case I think it was lower/

Ah yes,the recession,always good as an excuse that old chestnut.Doesn't seem to affect fans of premiership football clubs whom,I would imagine,have to fork out bigger money to follow their teams.

I read somewhere that the average age of premiership football fans is now 47. I suspect our average is considerably lower. If true then RL fans may have, on average, less disposable income compared to their soccer counterparts.

Premiership football clubs who have had to undergo unprecedented levels of advertising, not to mention a big cut in prices from what they would generally consider the norm.

Thats a new one to add to the list!.