I'm fine thanks, my football team Hartlepool United beat Dagenham & Redbridge 2-1 today. Two wins in a row now !
Last season they were skint, and now it's Leigh Centurions turn ! Not easy being a fan of 'smaller clubs'.

Cup final has to stay at Wembley. Makes our game look tacky and cheap if we move it up north. For me the solution is simple, move it back to may and build the event

It's not rocket surgery , everybody used to go to't cup final , now they go to magic,Bash , Cats Toulouse and the GF , we see people on here saying we need more ' events ' , but fans will only go to a certain amount , we aren't affluent union followers ( generally )

We will never fill Wembley again

The RFL should allocate 5,000 tickets to every club in SL, the championship and Championship with another 5,000 tickets to Barla......simply put, whomever sells their allocation first gets to keep all that revenue whilst every ticket sold would carry a 20% commission......£250,000. If a club wants to add a ticket to their ST offering, then so be it.....but the upshot would be if all those clubs and barla sold only 2,000 each, we'd have 78,000 tickets gone before the cup started!

Bottom line is I'd rather watch my team at Blackpool than 2 other clubs at Wembley

The Challenge cup has always been about the neutrals......at least all the ones I've been to have. Great atmosphere, banter, chatting with old mates and a game of RL.....

We need to sell the challenge cup final to Londoners, people want to attend big events at big name venues, we should aim to have 30,000 locals at next years final and allocate a marketing budget to fit. Perhaps the problem is the gate money going to the two clubs in the final, the RFL don’t have the motivation to do this.

some said there would be more at the cup final because catalans were in it

Yes it is/used to be , I've been to a few and enjoyed them immensely , but since then I've had ' event ' games including my club to attend as an option , plus the years of licencing which upset many , myself including

19 million followers/viewers for a celebrity youtube fight? the world has yet again confirmed it is in a state of madness.

The RFL had Eddie Hearn in the royal box yesterday. Matchroom sports are the people we need to sell the one off big events.

Mark Evans, the ex CEO of Harlequins and Melbourne Storm also owns the marketing company Capacity Consulting that pushed the 2013 Big Bash Semi-final event....the RFL know they need to use outside agencies to push "events" but have only done so sporadically.......Evans has also been employed by the NRL as a consultant to advise on increasing crowds and event games......he is also the brains behind the boxing-day Twickenham event for Quins that sees 70,000 for a regular season game and he was the guy who first took sarries to Wembley

Hearn will not "suffer fools lightly" and if engaged to promote an event, he will do it his way and he won't come cheap either, but if he can do for the game what he's done for darts, then so be it.......but I'd stick with the guy who has a great record of running event promotions and increasing gates

100% agree RE bringing in outside consulting. Barry does the darts/snooker, Eddie does the boxing nowadays - I'd take either of them or any advice they can give. We won't get Eddie though, he's trying to get a subscription service for boxing off the ground.

The current strategy of de-valuing tickets has never worked and will never work. It's been shown time and time again (in all sports) that cost of tickets doesn't really matter for one off events (sounds counter intuitive I know) all that matters is, do you have an event that people want to go to. One of the key ways of getting that feeling of "must be there" is exclusivity i.e. the thought that it might sell out.

The game feels like it's in managed decline with the same boys getting cycled around the same group of jobs.

I believe when Sarries 1st got close to filling Wembley it was on the back of £10 tickets, however I will raise the problem again, if Wembley gate money goes to the clubs in the final, where will the RFL get the cash to employ Evans/Hearn and market the event properly, there needs to be a significant annual budget allocated to this.