there was some stuff on facebook about a coach company letting a group of fans down at the last minute. also i think a coach broke down on the way. could have been one of those groups in those seats

A great watch.
Close, controversial, some well finished tries and some quality from both teams.
How Wigan kept it so close is a credit to them and they nearly pinched it at the end.

Well done to both clubs and congratulations to Hull for back to back wins.

Steady on Wrencat, you'll be getting yourself banned.

Suppose the attendance is just a symptom of the increased number of RL events and supporter numbers being spread too thinly.

We now have The Magic Weekend, Summer Bash, CC Final, SL Grand Final together with the Million Pound Game and divisional finals.

The CC Final use to represent a sole occasion where domestic RL from all corners would all gather, but now the proliferation of other marquee branded events mean it no longer offers that unique selling point.

This was the first year that the official attendance figure didn't include unoccupied Club Wembley seats, so in previous years the figure was inflated.

If Wigan had taken as many as Hull then the attendance would have been around 80,000.

It seems wiganers are not happy with a Wembley appearance these days.

The Club Wembley sections were actually some of the fuller ones.

It's indicative of the changes in our lifestyles. When I first started going to wembley in the early 80's there would be trips from schools and pubs all over the RL heartlands and wembley was the big RL day out. A trip to the "smoke" is no longer the exciting trip it once was. You see barely any neautrals now, whereas the crowd probably used to be at least half neutrals

The Club Wembley sections were actually some of the fuller ones.

You reckon? We walked round he stadium before we went in and saw every SL shirt except Catalans and at least half the Championship shirts (it may have been more because we wouldn't necessarily recognise all the Championship teams)

I meant in large numbers. yes there were neutrals there but go back 20 years and there were huge numbers of neutrals. maybe the change from may to august is a big factor

This

The coach that broke down some of the fans on board then caught a Taxi their was a picture of them sat in the taxi

I do not like this Jake but I agree, move it back to may has soon has possible

It's a mixture of many things, the main one being a general apathy towards the game from many of its loyal supporters, which means spending extra money to go to an event as a neutral is no longer as appealing, also the over saturation of events, but I'm also sure the August date doesn't help. It's smack bang in the middle of holiday season and it's the bank holiday weekend which is notorious for people heading off for breaks. Then throw in the fact that there are things like Leeds/Reading Fest on the same time, there's plenty of other things people are doing this weekend. A May weekend is much more like to see neutrals attend.