Only if you're a person trying to market a game for as much profit as possible you mean.

The flaw in that argument is that, while I have a real soft spot for the Cup and I admire anyone who can finish top of the league, winning the Grand Final really is the ultimate test of a team. There are no flukes or lucky draws to help you reach a Grand Final. The intensity of the play-offs is amazing - and in practise has been far too much for most SL teams - and that only comes AFTER you've striven hard for a reasonably good finishing spot in the table.

My original question was how to regenerate interest in the Cup, when it so clearly has been superceded in terms of importance by the play-offs and the Grand Final?

What about making the CC competition a handicap format? ie the team that finishes the last superleague season top starts every cc round with one point and the team that finishes bottom of championship 1 starts with 35 points and so on. We used the same system in Amateur RL and it gave the lower teams a better chance / incentive and stopped big clubs fielding weaker teams.

I love the CC so i won't pan it, but with the CC you could be lucky enough to not face anyone of note and win it.
Now imagine this wigan v saints
Wire v leeds and hudds v (lets say Cas)
Wigan beat saints, wire beat leeds
Cas beat hudds
Then next round wire v cas, wigan v catalan, then cats and cas win then next round both cats and cas go out. All the big teams take each other out and some team whose biggest game was Cas win the cup.
It makes it romantic but it doesn't make it the premier comp.

The Gf is usually 2 teams at the peak of their game which,for a neutral makes it a better quality game.

And I think most people are now more aware of this than ever before.

In the pre-Grand Final era, almost every trophy, with the exception of the League Trophy, was decided on a knock-out basis. So there was very little to compare the Challenge Cup with. It just happened to be the biggest of several similar knock-out trophies because its final was at Wembley.

Now, after a decade of Grand Final epics, especially as this coincided with a troubled times for the Challenge Cup - nomadic shifts between venues, the pre-season experiment, several mismatched finals - people have a much more grounded view of which is the more exhilarating event.

My problem is, lover of the CC though I am, I have a bad feeling that the genii is now out of the bottle. The CC semis and final have the potential to be as exciting as they ever were, but they won't always be, and I can't ever see a time again when the CC is viewed by the majority of the fans as the game's most prestigious competition.

The biggest factor, I think, is TV coverage. The Beeb simply aren't interested any more...and when the cup was at it's peak there was no competing coverage of league games.

They couldn't even be bothered putting on a highlights show similar to the Super League Show.

For all we complain about Sky, if they had the CC rights, they'd do a far better job of marketing and covering it.

I think you're right. But I have another, not-unrelated theory about the CC, which I admit may seem a little bit fanciful, but just give it a try.

The BBC loved the CC because it was - in their words - the People's Final. It suited their socialist-tinted university view of the world that the working class should be given a day out, and that everyone should celebrate it with them. If you think about it, while Grandstand would preview the FA Cup Final with non-stop, carefully edited action sequences (which contributed to making the whole occasion seem a lot more exciting than it ever turned out to be), it would preview the Challenge Cup by wheeling Colin Welland out to talk about mills, terraced houses and men of iron made from muck and brass.

I can't help wondering if the image of cloth caps and brass bands hasn't actually held the development of the game back in this country. Now that all that's gone, it genuinely seems as if the BBC have completely fallen out of love with Rugby League and don't know what to do with it any more. The CC - as the BBC's main tournament - could be the biggest casualty of that.

A very insightful and thoughtful post Cruncher !

I would be delighted to win either the CC or the SL. But for me the CC has lost its shine for me simply because of the luck of the draw. It seems like we haven't had a really big home tie for years and away the big games seem to have all been Leeds. Add to that the fact that we have failed miserably in our last 2 semis. I know though that the shine will return if we compete in the big games.

Having said that though I have always thought that more should be done to promote the Semi Finals as marque events in the RL calendar and having them so close to the final is ridiculous. Also why did we stop introducing the players one by one in the final?

I note today the general lack of excitement about the FA Cup Final. The Stoke chairman was interviewed on TV and looked very fed up that so much attention was being paid to the Man U game.

In terms of its big Cup competition, is football suffering the same problem as Rugby League?

Looks that way to me.

There are obvious paralell's and it's syptomatic of the same problem, if you want to call it a problem i.e. a breakaway top tier league fuelled by TV money going up against the sport's governing body and it's flagship knock-out competition. I don't think that Super League views the CC with the same disdain as the Premier League seems to view the FA Cup but it does appear that both leagues think that they are in competition with their corresponding governing bodies (the RFL and FA respectively), as opposed to working alongside them

Having Wire constantly droaning 'WEMBELEEEEEEEEEY......WEMBELEEEEEEY.....' at matches has ruined it for me.

Be interesting to read the views on here if you got there with it not being a big deal and all that.

Seem to remember it getting abit kiddy on here when you drew Catalan in the semi's

In all honestly, you are the reason i dont care about the CC anymore.

Knowing that such a poor team were capable of winning it devalued it greatly.

Thanks a bunch...

The poor team that beat you on the way in 2009?
or the poor team that beat the then current league champions in the 2010 final?

or that poor team you have only managed to beat 6 times out of the last 17 meetings and in that your last meaningfull victory was in febuary 2010 by a sultry 2 points

That's the one. The one that has never won a playoff game.

Think they've won one.

How predictable that this is slowly turning into another Wigan v Wire slanging match.

Wire fans need to stop being so senstive about accusations that the CC is easier to win than the Grand Final. It's quite obvious that it is, and there's no real argument to the contrary. That doesn't detract from the glory and honour of winning the CC, or having a great day at Wembley.

But the Cup is still of waning interest - not the final itself, but the overall concept. The purpose of this thread was not to decry Wire's achievement in winning it for the last two years, but to investigate why it's no longer the biggest fixture in the calender and maybe discuss possible solutions to that.

Agree with most of what you say here, I'd just change the "socialist tinted" bit to "condescending tw*ts"

I'd definitely give the CC to Sky but then make BBC show it in it's entirety, including the build up, the day after.

Its funny how the challenge cup loses its romance once you don't make many finals, how long is it now since you last appeared at wembley ? How long is it since you last lifted the challenge cup at wembley ?

You can bet your last £ that if Wigan had been appearing in any of the recent finals at wembley then the challenge cup wouldn't have lost any of its romance.

This thread comes across as a thinly veiled attempt to big up your grand final win and to put the challenge cup down as a cup thats not worth winning these days.

Very funny, i could belittle your grand final win by saying that it was one of the best oppertunities for a long time for a team outside of the usual names to get to a grand final due to St Helens being in regression and having no half backs at the time, you then had both Leeds and Warrington having the fatigue factor after the challenge cup final but i won't go down that road and say that the grand final lost some of its romance that year due to the above.

1/10

1/100 more like.

such a poor attempt!

just cos u get knowhere in it anymore

Another reason for you not to go down that road would be that it's completely irrelevant to the thread.