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

All of those things are irrelevant to the point I am making. I'm glad Marc green is reconnecting with the fans whatever that means. I'm glad he is trying to run the club in a sensible way.

But you can't argue that Bradford are on a long road to getting back crowds of ten years ago when they are falling away from crowds of 1 year ago.

The facts are that bradfords crowds have been in free fall facts or a couple of years INCLUDING this one. 5k is a poor crowd for Bradford and let's hope it always stays a poor crowd for Bradford because it will be a terrible day for them when 5k is a good crowd.

The million pound game being played by a couple of villages in Yorkshire in a ground that's only selling point is the blow up entry wildcat the players run through when entering the field.

What a mess the game is in. Has Big Nige got a Wiggo esq Olympic chair positioned in the temporary offices(corporate boxes!) sited at one end of the ground so he can lord it up over the baying minions?

You don't want yo yo clubs ????

What we have now will condemn 3 or maybe 4 clubs (from a top flight of 12) to playing in a relegation league, season after season, unless they happen to get lucky.

Although Sky will be happy with the excitement of a last day all or nothing game, having been through this experience previously (against Castleford), there is little pleasure in everything hanging on 80 minutes of RL, where 1 mistake by a player or official can so dramatically affect the fortunes of a RL club.

Under a sensible league system, where a clubs destiny is decided on their performance over the whole season, if you finish bottom (or, in a relegation spot), it isn't by accident and whilst the situation did arise in the Wakefield / Castleford game, that was a "one off".

The RFL and SKY have contrived a format that ensures that we will have this situation every season, quite ridiculous when peoples livelihood's are at stake.

He wasn't arguing that. He's saying it will take a long time to rebuild to those levels, without ever saying it's guaranteed.

You're seeking to turn that into a Bradford in freefall compared to last year argument, and it's nonsense.

There were two 8k+ crowds at the beginning of last year. They were before the second administration happened. After that crowds were pretty consistently about 6k. The first administration was bad, but I have never known people be as deflated as they were at that point. I suspect this is what is meant by Green reconnecting with the fans, although it has yet to get to the point where for instance my Dad is prepared to reinvest emotionally with the club.

When Catalans visited, a team with marginal travelling support, the crowd was near identical to what they have been all of this year. I would argue the home support has been pretty consistent compared to last year, and that this year the away support has been close to non existent in all but a few instances.

When a meaningful game came along the crowd was 9k+. When meaningless games against poorly supported teams were played on rainy days there were sub 5k crowds.

What this also means is people are picking and choosing their games at the moment, and the longer we are in the championship the longer that road back is going to be.

5k is bad for Bradford. So is trying to get promotion into SL. I wonder perchance if there's a connection.

edit: words