I am gobsmacked that the Crus are going to have a near 10,000 crowd at Wrexham tonight. This is a smallish town in an under-populated area with no experience of professional club RLand a weak team. If you estimate the number of people within 60 miles of the Stoop being 10 million and the percentage of these who have never seen a RL game being 95%, you see where I am going. It requires good partners, some dosh and a swashbuckling PR dept.

How about it Paul Blanchard?

Anybody any ideas have it can be done?, apart from the thin squad and lack of backers it is our biggest problem.
Or should we just jet Gutterfax back?

Or should we just jet Gutterfax back?

Not more bad news ..........things are not that bad

8000 for our first game as Quins-soon forgotten

There's nothing else to do in that horrible area.

Plus the fact the heartlands clubs are just up the road.........expansion area my ar5e

Short answer Yes. Will possibly.

Ah, you've been there as well!

the interesting thing will be is what crowd will they have when its back end of the season

As Celtic first couple of games they had pretty decent crowds but as season went on and they kept losing the crowds stopped coming
I feel sorry for the folk who made em a SL team!! the fans from Bridgend and Cardiff who supported em through the birth and NL campaign

There is no quick fix for this problem I am afraid. 3,688 as stated on the BBC website is a good crowd for Wakey and especially good when compared to other Feb/Jan fixtures against them in the capital.
I have said many many times 5k is the average gate target the club need and I would give PB and the team a while before pointing the finger (of failure) at them.

There was a half page advertisement for this match in last week's League Express with the slogan "just 100 minutes from Leeds and 30 minutes from South West Lancashire"! Which seems to contradict the RFL's main reason for granting Crusaders a licence in the first place.

I sense quins fans are envious/jellous of the crusaders on getting 10k for the first match they will get near/full houses against wigan,saints,wire and both hull clubs.

On the contrary...I applaud them and hope they can maintain that number all season if not improve on it......your powers of deduction on the other hand NEED to improve. London RL fans (yes, all 5 of us) want to see the game grow, so why would we be jealous of another "expansion" team doing well? Odd post or just another flatcapped tw@ with nothing better to do

We had almost as many for our first match as Harlequins, so i wouldn't get carried away just yet. I suspect Widnes, Barrow and maybe a few more NL clubs would have got capacity (or almost) crowds for those fixtures too.

For the sake of argument, let's just say Crusaders take root and flourish in Wrexham it will make a mockery of the RFL's whole licencing/expansion blueprint. Established clubs have been required to jump through various hoops, yet the RFL has ripped up its own rule book and accommodated a club in a town with no history of even decent amateur level RL just outside the heartlands. If Crusaders can pull crowds cmparable with most other SL clubs and be competitive on the field presumably we can look forward to welcoming the likes of Grimsby and Darlington into Superleague in the near future!

Full marks to them. I was thinking it was a bit like Fulham's first game, a big crowd who were learning as they went along. I hope they prosper,the more success outside the M62 the better, but it was a genuine question could it be done in London?

St Helens even struggle to get regular 10,000 attendances, but season ticket prices still go up, and I presume players wages, I still stand by Rugby League as a game wasted it's early big money days from Sky giving all the money to players and then Peacock says they want a 10 team Super League, I often wonder how many people live in the real world!

Congratulations to Crusaders and Wrexham, the ground looks good, there was a superb atmosphere, a good kit which is seems is proving popular, I just hope they can keep it up!

I get sick of all this that Wrexham is too close to Widnes, rubbish! no one in Wrexham think of themselves as anything but Welsh!

I was at this game, and I wouldn't have said the atmosphere was "superb". In fact it was one of the quietest 10,000 strong crowds I've been in for a long time. Not surprising as almost everyone present was either an away fan, a neutral, or someone watching their first RL game. If it sounded "better" on Sky that's probably down to their sound engineers trying to make the whole event appear more sexy and exciting.

The ground at Wrexham is very good and I had an excellent view from a modern cantilever-roofed stand. Despite one end being closed pending redevelopment it's certainly much better than the Brewery Field at Bridgend. Which begs the question of why the RFL, in its visionary far-sightedness, didn't award a licence to a Wrexham-based club instead of a South Wales-based one at the outset.

I was never especially in favour of or against the licence system in the first place; my main gripe over the whole thing is that the RFL set out a very clear (and controversial) plan for how it wanted to develop the club game at the highest level in Britain and Europe, but now seems to have backtracked with remarkable speed when it's "pet project" flopped spectacularly within the first few months. As I understood it, the licence system was supposed to promote steady development at a sensible pace and allow clubs who fulfilled most of an array of criteria to remain in Superleague indefinitely as long as they demonstrated a commitment to long-term progress. Crusaders - who accrued the lowest points total on the pitch of any Superleague team since Leigh in 2005 - appeared the ideal case to benefit from this commitment, yet it went spectacularly pear-shaped off the field and the RFL has bent over backwards to throw them a lifeline when it's clear they themselves are at fault for not vetting the club properly in the first place.

All this stuff about "expansion areas" and grass roots RL in those areas has been exposed as a load of old ballcocks, as it's clear than anyone putting up a load of money and offering a decent stadium in which to base a team can get in regardless of whether or not there's any history of RL being played in the area at any level. Let's take it a step further - suppose Wakefield's new stadium falls through - will they be allowed to relocate southwards to, say, Notts County's ground and abbreviate their name to "Trinity Wildcats" with a snazzy new black & white striped kit? It's like going back to the post-Fulham days of the 80's when all sorts of clubs sprang up beyond the heartlands. Alright if that's going to be acceptable fair enough, but the RFL should be straight about it instead of persisting with their now discredited licencing system.

I felt the atmosphere was fairly good for so many new people to the game, I remember Fulham V Wigan at Craven Park. The Racecourse and the crowd did look good on TV.

I have kept saying all the knockers of expansion, no one ever talks about Gateshead and Hull, should that have been allowed?

In a word no