It is £37 to sit in the centre of the South Stand at Leeds, £32 to sit in the 'wings' and £36 to sit behind the posts.

EDIT: We are also cheaper than Saints (£30.50) and Warrington (£31 pre-pay £33 matchday)

Dropping prices certainly won’t see a flood of people coming back but banging them up won’t either.

Maybe the way forward is putting certain games in categories. You mention cricket and t20 games. We play Yorkshire at Old Trafford and yes the tickets are £35 upwards but then there are games categorised lower than that which start at £20 and at least one game is £5 for any seat (I’m not saying we do that by the way).

Should a Thursday night game against Cas be the same price as a Friday night against Saints for example? Other sports would suggest not.

Categories are certainly an option yes, but if it's the same people coming you just lose money. You'll never truly know the difference for like for like games at different prices though (the club might)

I agree that we do under sell the sport sometimes and there is an element that the cheaper you keep making it, the cheaper the sport looks but I’m sure it’s something they’ve considered. I guess all options will be on the table with the new marketing exec in place. The Thursday games coming thick and fast at the start of this season hasn’t helped things and it’s those I’d probably target with a lower category. A Saints game is a Saints game and unless it comes at a time when there’s not a great deal on the line/a huge gap between the clubs , people in the main won’t have a problem paying prime money for a prime fixture.

Ultimately we all want the same thing, for crowds to start going up again. There’s no magic formula sadly and I suppose the main factor will be what happens on the field.

On the theme of attendances, only 2,627 at Wire today. We thought we had it bad.

Sad to see most of the crowds really but that’s a real bad one. It’s when you see teams like Whitehaven and Barrow getting crowds well in excess of their standard weekly crowd that you realise what the game is potentially missing out on by keeping superleague teams out of the comp until this stage. I used to love visits to grounds of teams not in superleague (I remember games at Batley, Barrow, Dewsbury, Keighley and the like a cracking trip to Limoux in 2004) but the chances of getting one of those now is 50/50 and for this one round only (unless there’s a shock or 2 lower league sides draw each other).

Barrow 3,135
Catalans 3,624
Hull kr 3,088
Leeds 5,112
Sheffield 1,039
Warrington 2,627
Whitehaven att not given
Wigan 6,005

4,900 ish at Whitehaven I read somewhere

And there is a very good reason for this.

As it was an FA Cup game, the gate receipts are split 50/50 after deductions, and as all Man Utd season ticket holders are forced to buy a ticket as part of the T&C of holding a ST, then every visiting club takes an allocation of up to 10,000 then pockets 50% of the 65,000 home fans who also have to pay top whack.

75,000 at £45 a head for adults generates over £3.3m. Even with concession prices and deductions, the visiting club walk away from a cup tie at Old Trafford with a cool £1m. That is why no visiting side ever agrees to a reduction in ticket prices.

I read on a Stains forum it was 6006.

Attendance given as 4,869

Some terrible crowds there. Has the magic of the cup gone? What can be done to recover some of that?

One suggestion I saw on twitter was for an early round to have all Championship/Lower League teams in one bag and SL teams in another bag. All SL teams to be drawn away thus giving the lower league home team a potential bumper crowd and the SL team a day on the road.

A guaranteed trip to Barrow/Whitehaven/Fev/Dewsbury/Batley.... Etc every season? I don't think that would be a bad shout, although knowing our luck we'd draw Leigh or Widnes.

The sport needs to do something. I just dont think it's all about ticket prices.

The cup certainly isn’t about ticket prices IMO and that idea is exactly how I would be starting to try and make a change. In football the smaller clubs want a day out at Old Trafford, Anfield etc but I don’t think going to a quarter full DW stadium, Haliwell Jones etc is the same draw for Rugby Leagues lower league clubs.

I like the double header semi finals and I think that’s a big step in the right direction. We’ll hopefully see 25-30k plus at Elland Road this year and it feels like a good event. Add in a round d where Superleague Clubs go to lower league clubs and I think we’ll have taken a couple of positive steps.

The gap between the two divisions doesn't help. There are plenty of shocks in football, but in RL they are usually walkovers.

Personally, I couldn't think of much worse than going away to a championship team. Away at Barrow or Whitehaven with a good % chance of a dog being on the pitch.

The CC is only good when you win it, for the rest of the time it's an unwelcome distraction imo.

I don't mean this as an insult, in fact the total opposite but you probably sum up the issue the cup faces then if that's your attitude. If people see the cup as a distraction and the focus has gone that much towards Superleague, maybe it's a losing battle. I absolutely love the Grand Final and the only way you used to get the feeling of being involved in a winner takes all game like that was to be in a cup final but maybe now people just see it as second rate and can only really get a buzz from a final.

I love trips to grounds we don't usually get to visit but then I like dogs

It's all opinion I suppose, I must admit I still remember going to these lower league grounds on a midweek night for a JPS/Regal Trophy or Lancashire Cup match. I can still remember the Bramley away Challenge Cup match where we were lucky to scrape a draw (10-10 iirc?) 37 years after it was played. Similarly a cup game over at Workington where Nick Du Toit booted the ball in the air the highest and hardest I've ever seen.

Yet ask me about some Wire cup game from a couple of years ago and it's impossible as it's faded into obscurity.

Yeah 100%, I guess. For me the league is the be all and end all. I want to see us be champions not CC winners. Both would be even better, but it's a tough ask & I'd always want the GF 1st.

As a side note, and well OT, but I'd be happy for us to have an A team and go and watch them play in the lower leagues. I just don't want to see guys like Tommy get banned or KPP get injured when we've got Saints on Good Friday. That's the big game, especially with our recent performance in that fixture.

Whilst some fans are price sensitive and there is an argument for reducing tickets by X to increase Y number of fans, the bigger issue is the overall pool of fans of the sport and individual clubs.

Football doesn't struggle and they have astronomical prices in comparison.

We should focus on growing the sport as a whole and growing our fanbase, those ticket prices aren't really the issue.

Growing up in the 8 in a row, the cup is massive for me.

I don't think the sport can afford the Challenge Cup to fade away into obscurity - its the only competition shown live on the BBC and still attracts the biggest (or 2nd biggest) crowd we have all year in the final.

I agree. Weve already lost two cup competitions decades ago, we can't let the Challenge Cup go as well.

I like the idea of sending SL teams to lower league grounds.

But knowing our luck, we'd get Leigh.

Or Leeds

Now then, now then!