Super League seems to have forgotten its fans

The opening-day fixtures of rugby league's Super League season are all being played at Millennium Stadium, in Cardiff - a long and expensive journey from the sport's heartland in Lancashire and Yorkshire.

The new Super League season has not yet kicked off and already fans are being asked to pay a huge price.

The Rugby Football League (RFL) has taken an enormous risk in decreeing that all the opening round of matches tomorrow and Sunday will be played at Cardiff's Millennium Stadium in Wales, hundreds of kilometres from the game's heartland of Lancashire and Yorkshire in northern England.

The RFL has been trying to expand the game for decades and now has teams from Wales and France playing in the Super League, but surely this year's Millennium Magic weekend is a case of wrong time, wrong place.

Opening-day games are normally among the poorest matches of the season as players shake off their rustiness and new teammates get used to different systems and so are not likely to be a proper advertisement for the sport.

Not only has the RFL switched the entire programme to South Wales it has also decided that most of the fixtures will be derby games, such as St Helens against the Wigan Warriors, two towns just 12kms apart, and the Bradford Bull versus the Leeds Rhinos, traditionally showdowns played before capacity crowds on public holiday weekends.

And the most ludicrous of all is the clash between Hull FC, who signed former Wigan full-back Cameron Phelps in midweek, and Hull Kingston Rovers. Fans from the city face a round trip of more than 600kms for a game many could walk to if it was staged at Hull FC's KC Stadium.

Of the other matches, St Helens against Wigan is a repeat of last season's Grand Final which drew 71,526 fans to Manchester United's Old Trafford ground while the game between the Warrington Wolves and the Huddersfield Giants is a replay of the 2009 Challenge Cup final, watched by 76,500 supporters at Wembley.

The last Millennium weekend attracted a two-day aggregate crowd of little over 63,000 to the 74,500-capacity stadium, less than the sum who attended the corresponding fixtures in the game's heartland last season when 20,079 watched the Hull versus Hull KR game alone.

The hope is the occasion will showcase the game but the fans are being asked to pay an extravagant price to fund the league's grandiose expansion plans.