- Feb 12, 2014
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Just on Melbourne vs Doggies, that was on a Wednesday night, which just plainly sucks, and still had that lingering covid effect. Plus it wasn't the most appetising game for Doggies fans to go to ona Wednesday night.I'll give the (slightly) more pessimistic view:
It's hard to get more than 90k to H&A games, as shown by Coll/Carl in R23 last year, which despite more anticipation than any normal H&A game for years and 'selling out' way in advance still only got 88k.
So be prepared for high 80s on Thursday and low 80s on Friday.
Melbourne got 58k against WB as a season opener and GF rematch but have very few other 50k games against non Big 4 teams. This is tricky to predict but I wouldn't be surprised to see it stall in the 40s.
Ess/Haw has currently underwhelming ticket sales but maybe people know they don't need to reserve a seat and can just turn up. Maybe 55-60k.
As for the rest, home games against interstate opposition for StK, North, GC, GWS and Port is about as bad a combination as is possible. Are we expecting any more than 10-15k for either the GC or GWS games? St Kilda and North v the Perth teams at Docklands both look like being mid 20s if we're lucky. Port hardly ever get to 45k if it's not a Showdown.
We could easily be looking at only 120k between those 5 games.
What's hurting here is the lack of a Perth game. Switch one of the Marvel games to Perth (as would normally be expected) and you can add 20-30k and 400k in total would be a breeze.
As it is I think it'll be touch and go for the overall round record.
Hopefully though your prediction is closer than mine. Would be great to smash 400k!
But yeah you're right though, there's only been 2 non-big 4 crowds higher than 50k against the Doggies (since 1997) so even 50k would be a good crowd
And on gold coast, I wouldn't be surprised if they had a good year for crowds, last team they went decent in 2014, they averaged 16k and I think with covid having much less of an effect, you'll have more travelling fans. It'd be good if they got about 15k against the Swans.
I don't think 2022 was really the year to judge crowds, it didn't start feeling normal until the very end.