Unlucky!

The French played well tonight, good glimpse of how they'll play in the Championship when Toulouse get a franchase.

Think the RFL have set a maximum price for this round so should be pretty reasonable.

Good idea if they have.

It seems that they're finally realising that interest in the cup game sis waning a little, and it's better to have a full house at reduced prices than just a couple of thousand die-hards in an otherwise empty stadium.

I'd far rather see the place rocking than be sat with the wind whistling through all the empty seats.

I agree totally. The challenge cup just needs a bit more marketing because with Sky plugging super league all the time its taken a bit of a back seat imo. I hope we beat Widnes because im away for that game so i cant go

The responsibility of the BBC and the RFL. The cup should definitely be rescheduled to allow a fluid run-in in the later rounds.

Very true.

The BBC do very little to promote the cup and the RFL are incapable of organising anything, let alone actually promoting it.

The first thing they need to do is to spread the rounds more evenly.
This idea of 11 weeks (IIRC) between QF and SF, but only 3 weeks from Semi- to Final is a joke.

Why not just hold one round every month from April onward for SL teams, with earlier starts for non-SL?

Someone posted on the VT that the 11 weeks is usually filled with Wimbledon, Olympics, World Cup, Euro Cup, etc. so there's no point competing with them.

Hearing the Widnes Cup Tie is going to be a Saturday Night fixture.

That was me. The large events such as those above attact larger audiences and are also listed events that must be on terrestrial tv. Most of them have to be shown in their entirety on free to air tv. The issue is not only competing for audiences but competing for slots in the schedules. There just are not the available slots on the BBC to put the Challenge Cup games. In order to have the rounds nefore the final on tv the gap has to be there with the cup running from Feb to August.

As I said on the VT there are two options to solve this problem either move the final back to May so that the earlier rounds do not clash with big events or keep the final in August and sell the rights to SKY (if the final is delisted) as they cannot show the big events named above so they would have the gaps in their schedule to accommodate it. Personally I would prefer the first of the two.

7.30pm kick-off on Saturday 8th May.

ai and they con shuv it too, half past seven on satday neet
who the hell pict that time

What?