The Wembley dilemma

This weekend has seen one of the big events of the rugby league calendar, Challenge Cup final day at Wembley Stadium. I'll start by saying people will probably say it's easy for anyone who wasn't there including me to comment and criticise, I get that and take it on board.

Secondly congratulations to the winners, Wigan Warriors women, Hull KR and York City Knights. It's very easy to criticise the crowd but those winners have given people that feeling of joy you only get when your team wins something. The flip side argument to that is seeing lots of empty red seats on the TV isn't a good look for the game.

Is three finals in one day too many?

For me yes it is, I'd go with two as an absolute maximum. So what would the solution be?

I'd scrap the 1895 Cup completely. Let's get The Championship and League 1 sorted in whatever format it will be and go with that. Yes, the fans and teams get a day out at Wembley and good for them but it's a bit of a non-competition for me. I was at Newcastle Thunder v Batley in The Challenge Cup earlier in the season and that had the buzz of The Challenge Cup around it. In the following game in The 1895 Cup against North Wales it may as well have been a friendly game.

I have an out of the box idea for a women's finals day and this could get me shot down very quickly but here it goes. Why can't we have a women's rugby finals day? I don't just mean rugby league here, approach the Women's Premiership in rugby union and have a joint finals day of The Women's Challenge Cup and The Women's Rugby Premiership. The two sports could work together to market it and sell it. This season could've seen St Helens v Wigan and Saracens v Gloucester-Hartpury. There's crossover in the women's game, the likes of Ellie Kildunne who is going to be the poster girl of the rugby union Women's World Cup played rugby league growing up. Working across sports could be beneficial for both sports. Make it a stand alone celebration of women's rugby, that could be hugely inspirational for a lot of people.

The main event

In short, let's make it one game with a load of community stuff around it, still have the schools final. But make it a big event, rugby union are heading for a sell out at Twickenham for The Premiership final next weekend, selling out Wembley is going to be a push and I get there's a lot of history at Wembley but is it too big? It looks as though the plan for now is to stick with Wembley and that's fine but work needs to be done.

Marketing

This comes back to one of my gripes around Magic Weekend, I know there was a figure that showed strong north east sales for that. But living in Newcastle unless you are a rugby league fan you wouldn't know anything was happening until the cameras roll into town on the Monday for the media day.

I'm guessing this is the same in London, there's a huge population that show they will attend one off events. The game needs to market beyond rugby league fans, get into large organisations and get marketing out through staff rewards schemes. The Ashes is going to be a big test of this in terms of how successful marketing can be but this is the area where the biggest improvement can be made.

If Wembley isn't working, let's face it lots of empty red seats doesn't look great on TV then Tottenham was a brilliant venue. There's The Emirates if they want to keep it in London. If they want to look outside then the usual stadia come into consideration, The Etihad and Everton's new stadium.

My mindset on things like this is if the game tries something but it doesn't work at least we're trying. If we keep doing the same thing which hasn't been working, the game stagnates and then regresses.

Some room for optimism

A couple of seasons ago one of the criticisms was no one knew when the next event would be never mind how and when to get tickets. Again before the men's final had finished yesterday the date was confirmed and you can register for tickets for next year, so the game has listened to the frustration of fans.