Quote ="the_grobs"People seem to forget that there was life before SKY. There were sell out crowds before SKY, and there many attendance records set that 15 years on with SKY have not come any where near being toppled.'"
You refer of course to the 1950s, a time LONG before television was affordable for many people and to watch sport you HAD to attend in person. There were massively fewer leisure activities available to the working classes as there are now, so you cannot make any direct comparison to that era.
Lets not forget the times directly BEFORE SL for Castleford as an example and this isn't a pop but just to prove my point. A heartland team with bags of history, other teams within close proximity and you were mustering 4-5K per home game the season before SL started, hardly sell out crowds? Do you know how many 10K attendance home matches you've had from 1985-1996? I'll tell you 4, yes 4 games, the last pre SL 10K attendance at Wheldon Road was against Australia in 1992.
So to Quins who have moved around over a relatively short space of time (losing most of the fan base they may have established) to in effect a new town, at a time when there are a million and one things for kids/adults to be doing. They don't have a 'community' of rugby fans stemming back from over a 100 years, haven't been successful and haven't been helped by the RFL (in the earlier days at a time when they needed support) so really Quins are going to struggle and will do for the forseeable future unless they can somehow be consistantly at the upper end of the table.
That's not to say we shouldn't continue to keep expanding but the RFL have formulated expansion as a panic knee jerk reaction to the popularity of RU and have just made a complete an utter mess of it.
'"
