Rugby Football League chairman Richard Lewis says that Harlequins' attendances should not yet be used to measure the success of the game in London. news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_l ... 456539.stm

Rugby Football League chairman Richard Lewis says that Harlequins' attendances should not yet be used to measure the success of the game in London. news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_l ... 456539.stm

Less crowds surely mean not much interest.

"..attendances should not yet be used to measure the success of the game in London."

That is such a ridiculous statement to make. Yes, youth development and such can be a sign of improvement, but if people aren't bothering to turn up and actually watch the stuff then it is obvious that RL isn't striking the right chord in London. Thus it is lacking in "success".

... unless I'm looking at this totally wrong.

Give em a break,after all they've only had 20+ years to spread the word.

Maybe it's because 'Up North' all you have is Rugby League.
Down here there are hundreds of other attractions & Interests

Chas n Dave? Laundrettes? Jellied Eel shops? Feeding the birds (two-pence per bag)? oh, and that luxury big wheel.......... can't wait to hit the big smoke- hundreds of attractions & interests to keep me entertained

You left out knife crime.

and drive by shootings

Isn't that in the next olympics?

and poverty that makes the worst parts of airdale look like the queens summer hideaway.

And tb (sorry mate)

You been Watching to many soaps mate

You'd have us believe asbos' are a thing of the past in Cas

You lot sound scared of the Capital



Stick to your joblessness and Wife Beating Northern Comforts

Uh surprise surprise a Wakey troll! how is up on the peacock today mate

Nah just congestion, smog, arrogance, Millwall fans not really my thing ( i could go on )

I actually like stepping out me front door and going for a run in the local woods without fear of being knifed

You'd be hard pressed to get knifed in london, they've all got 'shooters'

Don't wanna go there.

London is mint. I'm off down for three days in a couple of weeks. I love the atmosphere. Taking in Roger Waters doing the wall too. Ooh, a little bit of wee came out!

Hey! nowt wrong with London
Loads of buses and trains, museums a plenty, and best of all a lot more money.

Not all places are a dump, just the east, south, parts of north west and croydon.
It's lovely were i live

Ignore it mate. This one normally appears around the time we play them to clog up the board for a few days, before (thankfully) disappearing into the ether again shortly after.


I like London - not sure I'd want to live there but have had many a great weekend there in the past. Plenty to see and do, and it's easy to get about too.


To go back to the original topic, I was thinking about this the other day. Perhaps as part of the franchising process, every club should get a Joker, which they're allowed to play against any aspect of the criteria they choose. The chosen criterion is then omitted from the overall application, leaving the remaining elements of the bid in place to create a stronger application. So for Harlequins, they play it against attendances and we could play it against our facilities. Unfortunately for Wakey, it would only be possible to play it against one of the criteria, rather than all of them...



[size=50(ooh look trolls, we can make funnies too!)[/size

You are looking at it completely wrong. Sure Quins crowds are a measure of success, but they certainly aren't the only measure and nowhere near the key measure.

Viewing figures for RL in London are higher than most other areas of the country, I'm happy to be corrected, but I believe Super League on Sky gets more people watching it from the south than in the north. This, coupled with the number of amateur teams around London, the number of Londoners coming through to play Super League and international level shows the game is spreading to areas that aren't the heartlands.

As for attendances at Quins. For me to get to a Quins match, it would take around an hour and a half from my house in South London. To put this into perspective, when I lived in Birmingham it would take me an hour and a half to get to a Cas home game. Indeed, I could get to a Cas home game in under four hours now, so even though Quins is geographically a small distance from me, time wise it's the equivalent of a 100mile journey in the north of England.

Now, how many Cas fans go to away games? Significantly fewer than go to home games. This is due to proximity of the home ground to their home. If travelling for less than an hour is enough to put 90% of the Cas fans off watching their team in Hull, you can start to understand why the whole of London isn't moving en masse to every single Quins game.

The realistic target area for Quins home fans in Richmond. That is a population of around 200,000 people, making it around the same size as Huddersfield. Having a team in London is great for the game, but just because they're [iin[/i London, don't believe the Stoop is around the corner from Oxford Street and easily accessible to Londoners, because it's not, and as such, people won't make as much effort to get there and instead focus on local amateur games and watching SL on TV - and those are the real measures of the sport's popularity in London

Totally agree, on Friday i left my house in Barnet at 1655 hoping to get down there and catch a bit of the build up before the 1930 kick off, i arrived(only 20 miles away btw) at 1915.

From the most easterly point of the M25 to the most westerly point it is the same distance from the HJ to Headingley, i wouldn't exactly call that local.

I think a lot of people underestimate how big London actually is.

to add to that: it takes two hours to get to the Stoop. It takes me 3.5 to get to Wheldon Road

Quins's crowds - which are far from good - are no more the measure of the success of RL in London than Salford's are the measure of the success of the game in Lancashire

And how often do you go to WR?