Sadly, the semi finals are going to be as dreadful as the quarter finals were.

Assuming that is the final then one would hope so.

The structure of the competition is all wrong and its nothing more then a slot filler now for the BBC and occasionally Sky.

The cup should start around late Feb (for superleague teams) and have equally spaced rounds about 3 weeks apart with a final being played in May/June.

It's current set up is a joke.

Have to agree the cup should be earlier in the year, but I'm not sure it will increase attendances much.

More needs to be done across all fronts for Rugby League, it's getting pretty desperate in some areas.

So you hate the Challenge Cup, you hate the Super League, and you're hoping for the World Cup to fail so you can point and laugh.

The main question that remains is 'why do you bother?'

I hope for my teams sake that Warrington, Wigan and London are all reading this. Whilst I don't speak for all my fellow fans I can assure the RL world that most if not all HFC fans and certainly the owner and many of the players are desperate to win this competition.
Knowing exactly what it did for the club in 05 this is a major target of ours and we will be going all out to win it.
It is far from correct to say that we did all we could to lose on Saturday. Maybe one or two keyboards warriors need to have a serious think about the conditions that Hull and Catalans were playing in on Saturday. Despite the knock ons which were attributed to the conditions, the desire and commitment on display was at times fantastic. Hull's defensive display was excellent.

I am not saying all is rosey far from it. But come on lets have a little less of the apathy. Wires display was spot on for 60 minutes until they took their foot of the gas. Almost perfect controlled rugby. Ok Huddersfield made mistakes, but I would rather attribute that to Wire than Huddersfield.

The Wire HFC semi promises to be a cracker. Remember Hull won 9 of 11 before their mini slump one of which was against Wire at the HJ. So I would suggest that anyone who thinks that its a foregone conclusion that its a Pies Wire final really does not know a great deal about RL currently.

I await Sunday week when this comment is ramned back down my throat after two awful, no one wants to win it, semis.

To irritate you & it looks like it’s working .

But I thought we wanted every game in SL to be like a cup game, with everything on the line, 'trap door football' and all that??

Looking at last night's game, I really don't see where the "give teams something to play for and their performances will improve" argument comes from.

I blame the licensed, 14 team, Top 8 play-off Super League culture. Hopefully, this culture is about to be flushed down the toilet in it's entirety where it belongs with the rest of the excrement.

Super League clubs have become that used to being rewarded for their regular season mediocrity, they carry that mediocrity into the knockout games when there is something to play for. They don't know how to behave or perform any different, and this explains all the mediocrity on display in the CC rounds and in most of the Super League play-off fixtures.

The fans can't even be bothered turning up to witness this ongoing farce as attendances for the CC and the SL play-off fixtures clearly indicate.

Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Could be a record low semi final crowd for Wigan vs London, if they can only pull in 6200 for a home quarter final.

Like it did to Crusaders and London when they change it to 12 teams in super duper league!!! I may be still ill informed though...

I'd suggest the off button then, except you need to count the number of spectators for your increasingly dull threads.