Why wont it look good? From my seat I will see 40000+ other rugby league fans enjoying two games of rugby and hopefully an England win. To me that sounds good.
Who cares if there are empty seats? It just shows people are missing out

This is what I've been trying to point out. You keep going on about the crowds in 90 and 94, but to get to those level of crowds a leap had to be taken from Wigan (20k) to Wembley (54k).

I've also been trying to say that going to Wembley this year is about building up crowds, like you say sticking to big stadiums. Its part of the strategy heading towards the WC, so we can have some cracking crowds then.

We also don't have a history of filling Wembley. 1994 1st Ashes Test is probably the greatest GB victory over Australia on home soil. No one remembers that two thirds of the stadium was empty.

The fact that there have been a lot of offers doesn't negate from the success of the venture down there. We haven't been there for well over a decade. We will have a crowd comparable to previous years and put us in good stead for the future.

It gives the League hating media more ammunition.

What ammunition? That we are on course for our highest attendance for an international in many years?
To me that sounds terrible, it really does. Should make a good headline "England RL get 40k but its a disaster as some people only paid £10"

2 matches of top RL struggle to get 40k with most paying 10 pounds of half price for their tickets....thats how most southern RL bashing types will look at it.

I don't recall many times where in an article that the press go on about the price of a game. If anything I think they would be positive articles saying that in the time of the recession they have seen this and put offers on so it is available to the masses not just a select few.

Nope it's how a number of northern RL bashing types - who ironically claim to be fans of the game - look at it.

hi, i was wondering how much tickets are for this event, how many people are going and how many people went to comparable events like this one between twenty and thrity years ago. any help would be greatly appreciated.

In essence the actual volume of tickets sold is largely irrelevant, although the more the better obviously. What is relevant is the amount of revenue generated by those sales - I just hope that the revenue is sufficient to at least allow break even on the staging of the event. From a business perspective, having 45,000 people there but losing money on the event is not a success so I hope the pricing has been carefully calculated to avoid that scenario. Ultimately the thing that this sport is most short of is money and losing money on a flagship event which should be a great revenue generator would be a cardinal sin in my book.

Proper businesses often go for options that may not generate the most cash immediate term, but develop the business better long term.

Charging an extra fiver for 20k less tickets in Wigan and claiming "success" is short sighted.

What media hates league exactly ?
Very well supported by Sky (better than most sports), treated very well by the BBC (it is the only sport outside football that has national coverage of a magazine progam of the national competition), local radio and local news papers support RL very well Quins get an inordinate amount of coverage on BBC London, gets reasonably good coverage on talk sport Radio also. What you are talking about is "some" national newspapers are indifferent to RL that is not the same as hating RL.

It is a success if it's part of long term plan, you have to speculate to accumalate in any business. We've neglected internations for too long, Richard Lewis is he'll bent on Progress, if it costs money in the short term then so be it.

Also like the idea of it being shown on terrestrial tv. Again if we have to settle for a lower deAl, so what - the long term benefits are massive. This is how the afl grew their game quickly.

I really can't see how we will look bad in the media at all after this weekend. Especially when you look at what the BBC are writing about our siblings; www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/alastaireyky ... e_rag.html

I really can't see how we will look bad in the media at all after this weekend. Especially when you look at what the BBC are writing about our siblings; www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/alastaireyky ... e_rag.html