I find it strange they didn;t hold this test in Christchurch given the size of the respective populations and the turn out for teh WQarriors game this season. Was it due to the earthquakes?

Agreed, if PNG had played either or both their games against England and Australia we would be looking at a huge success. If we keep up this international calendar and keep promoting the Euros and Pacific cup, we could be looking at a gradual improvement of international RL. Fingers crossed.

World Cup qualifiers next year.

Hard as it is to say...but spot on Old Dear!
Better to have 15,000 filling port M rather than a half full parra stadium. PNG at home to All 3.......NZ at home for 2 (Eng/Aus) Australia for 1 (Eng) and the final.

It would appear that if they get a good crowd in Melbourne then it'll be despite the promotion of it rather than because of it. Dave Woods (BBC) wrote on Twitter....

[iBeen in Melbourne 5 days now; a city blissfully unaware that a rugby league international is being played here on Sunday! [/i

Anyone know how many where at the NZ-PNG game?

nz and png looked a pathetic crowd. According to one of aussie papers we be lucky to get 22,000 tomorro

Well der Melbourne is an AFL town and it'll be in full swing with the Melbourne Cup(horse racing), but in saying that you'll get 20,000 to watch two snails race up a wall so the test match will get it. Melbourne truly is Australia's sporting capital regardless of what people from Sydney and Brisbane say.

around 6,500k at Rotura which is very disappointing. Lovely day and Kiwis on fire I was expecting more.
Bad weather in melbourne, reckon around 22-25k will turn up.

I hope a few Aussies do RL a favour and sell it out.

So where did you get the figures from in your OP?

No link I notice...

The Rotorua crowd paints your OP in a very poor light.

England were behind Australia, but let's have a neutral set of officials next time. Some strange decisions.

just over 18k in Melbourne. With next weeks game being meaningless it will sadly knock the attendance down by 5-10k I reckon.

Hopefully the final will sell out, reckon it will if NZ get over Aus next week.

Only PNG will be walking away with any money from the 4N at this rate.

Only PNG will be walking away with any money from the 4N at this rate.

So to repeat JB you just made up the ticket sales in the OP?

For the record...

Tickets should have been available to buy months and months ago. Every amateur club in Australia should have been offered tickets and tickets hould have been available outside NRL games throughout the season. Be it the RFL, RLIF, NRL or ARL, rugby league governing bodies couldn't organise a pish up in a brewery. They couldn't run a bath. If they fell into a barrel of tits they'd come out sucking their thumb.

Exactly.....
Don't understand why the Kiwis bothered playing in rotarua.......very odd decision. Wellington or Mt Smart would have seen a much better crowd......terrible attendance...bordering on embarrassing.
The Game in general seems scared to market itself........but the way the fixtures have panned out this year only add to the trouble.....NZ V Australia next week is a nothing game.....it should have been one of them v PNG with the other being a potential semi-final......as it is, England v PNG won't add many bums on seats and who is going to pay to watch a dress rehearsal of the final?

Rotarua is a small town with about 70,000 people....32,000 blokes.....not exactly a League Hotbed. Wellington managed to get a decent crowd through marketing and networking with the clubs in the region.......Rotarua was never going to be a good crowd........NZRL should have maybe played the game on the south Island...or back at Wellington.....I reckon another 20k would have been possible at the cake tin.......and the Junior Kiwis comeback would have been worth the ticket price on its own!!!!

Week 1- England v PNG, NZ v Australia
Week 2- Australia v England, NZ v PNG
Week 3- NZ v England, Australia v PNG

Hindsights a wonderful thing

Certainly is and I've got bucketloads


That was the fixture list I wanted before the 4 Nations started.
You know a thing or two about marketing (that's the rumour anyroad), how can rugby league continually make such a monumental balls up of such a straight forward thing?

Isn't that the lineup we had at the Four Nations last year (with France taking PNG's place, obviously)? I seem to remember the Aussies -v- Kiwis game as being the first one (and probably the best one to be honest). Those two should go head to head straight away because they are most likely to be the teams in the final. Who on earth is going to watch the same game twice in a week? Not me, that's for sure! I can't see the paying public in Australia doing so either.

It hasn't got much to do with marketing (though that is deficient), as marketing is just a symptom of the two problems.

The two issues are (1) misinformation and (2) lack of exposure.

Almost every problem in rugby league comes back to those two things...

Without wanting to attract abuse from certain quarters, there is an organisation based in Dublin that the International League board could do with keeping an eye on. Since I started watching League I have always wondered how a game that is so much better remains the poor relation on the international and English stage.....and I always come back to the 1 thing that stands out about League......it seems almost afraid to market itself.
I am not saying that millions need to be spent, but simple tactics, planned well in advance and executed on time can raise the awareness levels for the game....simple fixture planning (as with yours), allocated marketing budgets and setting up channels of communication that cost nothing.
The Kiwis v England game used "contra" marketing with the local paper, radio stations and regional free sheets.......prizes, tickets, shirts etc were used. TV was funded centrally and was pretty much SKY heavy in that they pushed the games on their own channels.....
Local clubs who play in the WRFL competition were used as routes to market and there were various "bus-trips" from some of these clubs which attempted to stop at every pub on route to the game

......the result of a load of hard work was a crowd 25% up on the last League test played at the cake tin...
Rotarua was a big error in the planning of this tournament....it was never going to sell well....and the double header at Eden Park was/is a gamble......it is a pig of a stadium to get to and now it's a dead rubber it will be at least 5k down on what it could have been........
The positive from this years tournament has to be the Wellington crowd........it was nearly double the Australian gate for the Parra game and it showed that League has a place in the area........with only a free ticket Lions game, all blacks v South africa and finals soccer attracting bigger crowds to the stadium this year....