Has to happen! Bring everyone you know that is a Manly fan. Weather pending, a sunny day should get over 17,000 for sure! With Wests v Souths at Allianz on Friday, and being a Wests home game, we may just get a bigger crowd than them. If that happens, it will be LOL@NRL once again. 13,000 at Allianz for Chooks v Eels on Saturday, pathetic!
According to the NRL the most important issue is the quality of the ground/stadium. Wrong, as can be seen from the poor crowds at the modern stadiums this round: 15,120 at Gosford; 13,900 at AAMI Park; 13,269 at Alliance Stadium; 12,000 at CBus Super Stadium; 14,600 at Hunter Stadium We get more at the always maligned Brookie.
The AAMI Park is the one that is the real elephant in the room. State of the Art Stadium, Tram access or even a 20 minute walk from CBD, one Team City, Sports mad City and they are running at 30% capacity :dodgy: http://stats.rleague.com/rl/crowds/summary.html#venues Manly Home Games Average 12,585 Scumos Home Game Average 12,114
Wests/Souths is actually at ANZ this Friday night as part of their new home venues so can you imagine that crowd now.. it's gonna be terrible. Sunday will be my first game of the year and I'm definitely looking forward to it!
I'll be there can't wait! Sunday arvo games are as rare as hen's teeth for Brookie these days so need to make everyone count!
With so much focus in the media lately about poor crowds, hopefully this weekend manly can show the nrl why local grounds are the better option with a packed out brookie!
Its gonna be the Ch Nein Sunday match. Gus Gould will get to trot out "The fans love their Sunday afternoon football". And any appeal he makes to the NRL or "powers that be" to do something about their decisions will be completely mechanical. They would be ignored anyway. Comparisons between attendances at Brooky compared to other games so far this year, will not be mentioned by Sterlo, Wabbits and the others. Channel Nein have only one agenda, and that is not for the 'game' but for Channel Nein. This is why the Nein commentators love to see even-up refereeing towards the end of matches, and why they constantly promote that the matches are more 'evenly matched' than they really are.
AAMI has a capacity of 30K, so they're getting 40%, we've got a capacity of supposedly 23K from the aus stadiums site, so we're at just over 50%. The flipside to the argument is that we have 6-7 local sydney teams playing us during the year at home, that bring with them a few thousand supporters, while Melbourne have no local rivals and are lucky to get 1,000 opposition supporters to one of their games. I'd love us to have a 30K stadium, with 20K ticketed members turning up each week. Would be magical. Any of our proposed upgrades really needs to increase the ground capacity as well as undercover seating and corporate.
Gould will probably be at Manly buying fish and chips while the game is on. He is not much of an ambassador for the game when he doesn't even watch his own team play [hr]
AAMI has seating capacity, Brookie has standing capacity. Big difference ! The two stands hold about 7k at Brookie. The 23k Brookie number was before the Southern Stand was built, which also took away a good quarter of the Hill. The height was reduced and we used to walk under it on the SE corner, now its a walkway. Now Public Liability Insurance has two walkways also fenced off on the Hill. The Away Fans at Brookie can easily counted too. The most would be the Dogs Fans, about 2k and that is only since the 2012 defection. Local Stadiums basically have home Team fans. Maybe thats why the NRL are pushing the neutral stadiums,( although I believe its more to do with the setup costs for the Broadcasters). But it aint working as the atmosphere can not be transferred without a near capacity crowd. The falling attendances will continue to be a headache for the powers that be. Newcastle are complaining in one of the papers today about our next Gosford game taking away from their identically scheduled game. NRL need geography lessons :dodgy:
Why did we used to get upwards of 27,000 at Brookie to watch matches against Parra? The answer has to be because of the rarity of the event. Nowdays we can watch every match on TV. Look what TV has done to crowds at Sheffield Shield matches.
27,000 was only once. I have posted the attendance records at Brooky several times, and the attendances not being those numbers these days is a complex cultural question as well as a 'physical capacity' question at Brooky. The view from the Western side of the ground reveals that the Hill is a shadow of its former (1970-80's) self, and you just cant fit in the numbers of people compared to days of yore. The Hill is actually pathetic, and should be renamed "the hillock" lowercase ! or praps 'the mound'.[attachment=763]
