I take your point but in one off games the top Championship sides have been capable of giving some better SL teams than Wakey some rough rides in recent times.

I know... But I literally don't want to

That does seem to be the narrative doesn't it? Thanks largely to the Sky idiots, led by Eddie, it's been Leigh all season long; when it became obvious that they couldn't hack it against SL opposition, their affections switched to Bradford.

Seems that the only people who want Wakefield to win are Wakefield fans - to everyone else, that would mean the fairy tale didn't come true.

Good luck to both teams, it's knock out rugby and anything can happen. Hope the fans from both clubs enjoy the game and may the best team win!

Bricking it far too much to consider it an enjoyable afternoon coming up. If we turn up with our best game we'll have too much for Bradford but our best game has been missing for all but a few days this year.

Agree that is unlikely SL will provide such a weak side in this match in years to come. Glad of the home advantage and I don't think the RFL are likely to sanction a bigger neutral venue in the future to attract neutrals when they are trying to shift Grand Final tickets at this point in the calendar.

The million pound game itself is not the thing that has reinvigorated the season, it is the Super League door being unlocked to the top Championship clubs, which would have also happened if we had gone for 1 up 1 down or 2 up 2 down.

Leigh were said to be nailed on for promotion and there was the prospect of others also gaining promotion or, so they (the RFL) thought.

The reality has been somewhat different and with a couple of exceptions, the SL clubs have been too strong for their Championship rivals.

That said, we have now come down to the decider Wakefield Trinity vs Bradford Bulls.

Trinity have been a train wreck this season and if we were on regular promotion/relegation, they would have been relegated with a number of weeks left in the regular season.

The Bulls (and Leigh) have been head and shoulders above the rest of the Championship but, their "qualifiers" campaign has been a very mixed bag.

The game is set up nicely and is impossible to predict, which will make it great viewing for the neutral but, for this to be the case EVERY season is not great for the clubs who end up in this do or die match, surely, promotion (and relegation) should be decided on form over the full season and not in some end of season "freak show" which has a similar attraction to a public hanging, which thank God, no longer take place in this country.

As a lifelong Trinity fan, there will be no pleasure in the game itself but IF the result goes Wakefields way it will be a great afternoon. Sadly, we will be back in the qualifiers next season and quite possibly back in the MPG.

This may be true but you've got to hope we'll get something better together on the pitch. A better points haul and at least genuinely competing with the teams around us would be a start.

Current system is great. Automatic 1 up 1 down would be no good. Don't want the old yo-yo syndrome. Imagine the disruption to say Wakefield if they went down one year, back up the next then down again etc. (Especially with the big change in funding each year). At least this way, Wakefield gets the chance to stay in Super League indefinitely.

Eh??

But, we were in that position and it was because we weren't good enough in the first 23 rounds.

Let's just hope everyone stands in the right place. It would be unthinkable for a home fan to have to stand next to someone with a different shirt on to them.

I think you're looking at Bradford through rose-tinted glasses. Long past are the days of Bullmania, the last 10 years have seen the club decline dramatically both off and on the field and there's a long road of rebuilding that needs to happen before those big crowds come back.

Anyone think this should be the curtain raiser for the Grand Final?

the name has always baffled me, do the winners actually get a million pounds?
or is it a nickname , like the football league championship play off is nicknamed the 80 million pound game or something like that?
just curious, if it's not really a million pound game then what it is exactly?

no!
why should 2 clubs who have been a joke off the field and aren't good enough for super league share the biggest stage with the best 2 teams?

Depends, what type of person you are and your outlook on life. Sounds like you could be a 'glass half empty' type of person. The concept has brought life to normally pitful ends of season. OK, you can say Wakefield have been mediocre, but all they did is play the system? That's not their fault. Perhap a few tweeks to the results will alter this happening again. As for Bradford, being a Giants fans, like me a Salford fan, know what its like to be relagated from SL, so you trying tell them the game is pointless.

Seems to me all RL fans want to moan and complain because for the sake of it.

The Grand Final should stand on its own. Unless Huddersfield get there, at which point the crowd might need padding out a bit.

we could always seek out those 10,000 missing bulls fans

The winner gets £1M more in central funding for next season than the loser does.

Nope the Grand Final doesn't need a curtain raiser, plus it then takes away home advantage for the team finishing 4th.

That's a nice narrative but it's entirely at odds with the facts. These crowds are bradfords lowest for a long long time by a pretty substantial margin. If Bradford increase their attendances by 50% next season, they will only be where they were last season, when they were relegated and didn't even know if they were starting the season until the last minute. They would need another 1k to get to 2013s level and another 4k on top of that to get to 2012. We are looking at figures nearly 1/3rd of 3 years ago.

thanks, i genuinely didn't know it it was actually worth £1M or just a name.

What facts? Bradford last won the Grand Final 10 years ago. Since that point they have consistently gotten worse every year until they went bust twice and got relegated leaving the club in a bit of a hole with poor off-field performances to go with the poor on field issues and a fanbase that has been burnt once too often by less than honest guys running the club.

Marc Green, the current chairman and owner, is doing what the last 3 regimes failed to at Bradford and re-connect with the fans and make sure the club is run in a sensible way. But as I said before, there's still a long road and a lot of rebuilding to be done by Bradford before they get back to the crowd levels they had 10 years ago.

I wouldn't trust those post 2010 Bradford crowds at all. They weren't a measure of how many people were there and they weren't a measure of what people were paying to get in.

I would guess that whoever wins the game on Saturday will spend the end of next season in the bottom 4 of SL, and then find themselves fighting it out in the qualifiers to avoid playing in the same fixture