I hope a few Aussies do RL a favour and sell it out.

So where did you get the figures from in your OP?

No link I notice...

The Rotorua crowd paints your OP in a very poor light.

England were behind Australia, but let's have a neutral set of officials next time. Some strange decisions.

just over 18k in Melbourne. With next weeks game being meaningless it will sadly knock the attendance down by 5-10k I reckon.

Hopefully the final will sell out, reckon it will if NZ get over Aus next week.

Only PNG will be walking away with any money from the 4N at this rate.

Only PNG will be walking away with any money from the 4N at this rate.

So to repeat JB you just made up the ticket sales in the OP?

For the record...

Tickets should have been available to buy months and months ago. Every amateur club in Australia should have been offered tickets and tickets hould have been available outside NRL games throughout the season. Be it the RFL, RLIF, NRL or ARL, rugby league governing bodies couldn't organise a pish up in a brewery. They couldn't run a bath. If they fell into a barrel of tits they'd come out sucking their thumb.

Exactly.....
Don't understand why the Kiwis bothered playing in rotarua.......very odd decision. Wellington or Mt Smart would have seen a much better crowd......terrible attendance...bordering on embarrassing.
The Game in general seems scared to market itself........but the way the fixtures have panned out this year only add to the trouble.....NZ V Australia next week is a nothing game.....it should have been one of them v PNG with the other being a potential semi-final......as it is, England v PNG won't add many bums on seats and who is going to pay to watch a dress rehearsal of the final?

Rotarua is a small town with about 70,000 people....32,000 blokes.....not exactly a League Hotbed. Wellington managed to get a decent crowd through marketing and networking with the clubs in the region.......Rotarua was never going to be a good crowd........NZRL should have maybe played the game on the south Island...or back at Wellington.....I reckon another 20k would have been possible at the cake tin.......and the Junior Kiwis comeback would have been worth the ticket price on its own!!!!

Week 1- England v PNG, NZ v Australia
Week 2- Australia v England, NZ v PNG
Week 3- NZ v England, Australia v PNG

Hindsights a wonderful thing

Isn't that the lineup we had at the Four Nations last year (with France taking PNG's place, obviously)? I seem to remember the Aussies -v- Kiwis game as being the first one (and probably the best one to be honest). Those two should go head to head straight away because they are most likely to be the teams in the final. Who on earth is going to watch the same game twice in a week? Not me, that's for sure! I can't see the paying public in Australia doing so either.

It hasn't got much to do with marketing (though that is deficient), as marketing is just a symptom of the two problems.

The two issues are (1) misinformation and (2) lack of exposure.

Almost every problem in rugby league comes back to those two things...