Both clubs had agreed that, to maximise the potential attendances, the two games should be held at venues other than their own stadia (the Recreation Ground and Central Park).

The day after Bath's Pilkington Cup final, Wigan played a Super League game at home to Paris Saint-Germain, which they won 76–8.

The difficulties that Bath had with coming to terms with the game led to further tries for Offiah (2), Henry Paul, Jason Robinson, Terry O'Connor, Andy Johnson, Craig Murdock and Scott Quinnell, with the score at half-time 52–0.

[3] Prior to these, the club became the first rugby league side to play at Twickenham when they sent a strong squad to take part in the Middlesex Sevens, a tournament that they went on to win, beating Wasps in the final.

[8] With Bath having won the league and cup double, and the domestic season concluded prior to the first game, they were able to concentrate on the preparation for the second encounter.

Bath again kicked the game off, but this time, rather than conceding a penalty, Jon Callard's kick enabled Martin Haag to take and recycle the ball, allowing Bath's forwards an early opportunity to ruck and maul against opponents unused to this type of play, with Wigan failing to win any of the first twenty rucks.

It was 18 minutes until Wigan handled the ball in the opposition half, with Bath gaining further tries through Adedayo Adebayo (2) and Jon Sleightholme prior to half-time, allowing the Courage League champions to build an unanswered 25-point lead at the break.

Jonathan Davies, the dual-code international, made the observation that Wigan were suffering from constant infringements of "rules they didn't know existed".

Craig Murdock scored a pair of tries that went the length of the field, while Va'aiga Tuigamala got a third before Ian Sanders got Bath's seventh with a pushover from the pack.

[9] A lot quicker than it looks from the sidelines, this union business.Craig Murdock, WiganAlthough played in some quarters as the start of a great coming together of the two codes, most people saw the "cross-code challenge" as primarily a commercial exercise.

[10] Wigan, having lost out on the income generated by a run in the Challenge Cup, were looking for ways to regain that, while Bath were in the process of making the transition into a fully professional outfit.

[12] However, one of Bath's star players at the time, England centre Jeremy Guscott, refused to play in the series, as he felt that there was a lack of balance between the two games - the only alteration that took place in the league fixture came at half-time when Bath requested unlimited substitutions (rather than the fixed number of ten interchanges normally permitted); apart from this, the match was played as a standard, full intensity game of rugby league.

A number of Wigan's players from the cross-code series undertook such moves, including Jason Robinson and Henry Paul who turned out for Bath, as well as Martin Offiah, Va'aiga Tuigamala and Gary Connolly.

Some later made permanent moves to the 15-a-side game, with Tuigamala's transfer to Newcastle Falcons for £1m being a world record, while Robinson became a mainstay of the England rugby union team, winning the World Cup in 2003, as well as becoming the first player to win both league's Super League and union's Premiership titles (with Wigan and Sale respectively).