Late 80’s early 90’s Wembley went fully all seated which was phased in over 3-4 years capacity reduced to just under 80k up untill rebuild so most finals up to around 98-99 where just about sell outs. Sheffield Wigan was probably first poor attended final as it was perceived as a walk over for Wigan.

So we play the CC final on August BH weekend. Is this through choice by the clubs & RFL ;a quirk of fate ; or has it been foisted on us because no other sport is interested in this weekend & the BBC has nothing else planned ?

Well I've just got on the train so here goes absolutely nothing.

Just as it does for ALL of it's other major sporting events, the BBC should be advertising the event and something significantly better than the cringeworthy graphic copied from the SL show would help slightly but, as the sports broadcasting partner, they should be helping with the build up to what is supposed to be a major sporting event.

Have a sneaky feeling for Wire today. Can understand their fans pessimism but cup finals are a different beast.

That's true. Even when we're favourites, we still lose them.

Club Wembley definitely masked the numbers by 10k or so.

But there has definitely been a decline in neutral support, i've attended in 2008, 2013, 2016 and 2017 with Hull, the crowd went down 82k to 68k in that time, 10k is Club Wembley, but theres still another 4/5k who have gone missing. The size of the Hull and Saints/Wigan support felt about the same from memory.

There needs to be some acceptance that when you're talking about an individual club's following, you're talking about clubs in a sport where even the biggest get maybe 15k at absolute best for home games. That's being generous too. For many clubs it's <10k. No club actually has 30k passionate fans, as evidenced by not a single ground in Super League requiring that capacity, and few if any games anywhere being sold out. This isn't a dig at "glory hunters" because without them we might as well play our finals in Huddersfield and no one wants that. What it means though is that if a club does take a 30k following to a final, a large number of them will be casual fans who have little or no interest in going every week. Those people will often not be up for going every single time once they've been before, so that explains the drop off. Wires fans used to slag off Wigan fans for not turning up, taking it for granted etc. We're now in a similar position as we go to our 11th major final since 2009. The fact that we've developed a habit of losing them obviously doesn't help, but that's a separate issue.

To be well attended these finals rely heavily on neutrals, and with so much else going on now - including withing RL with events like Magic - "Wembley weekend" is never going to be the big day out for thousands that it used to be.

I just hope RHP doesn’t run onto the field during the sport’s showpiece event as the match is being played.

Warrington by 8. We will choke

Saints by plenty.

Least the RFL cannot blame Catalan Dragons for disappointing gate today.