Home sweet home(bush)

In the debate about home ground finals games for Sydney clubs I can understand the NRL’s position. In general, getting more people into games – especially showpiece games – can only be good for the code. Not to mention the fact that the clubs agreed at the start of the season to shift home finals to bigger stadia so there’s certainly some support for the idea that it’s a bit late for the Tigers and Manly to start complaining now.

Even so, the arguments against playing Tigers v Dragons at ANZ Stadium and Manly v Cowboys at the SFS seem overwhelming.

For a start, the signs are that neither game is going to attract a big enough crowd to warrant the move. NRL director of football operations, Nathan "Goebbels" McGurk, predicted on September 7 that the Tigers game will get “40,000-plus” fans while the Manly match will be played in front of “20,000”. That’s 20,000 dead – not at least 20,000 – so given the NRL’s tendency to inflate expected crowds like a third-world dictator's election results my hunch is there is no chance whatsoever that the game will have a bigger crowd than Brookvale Oval’s 23,000 capacity.

Meanwhile the SFS holds 45,500 and is a Tigers home ground, so the NRL’s decision is apparently to shift the Tigers game to a neutral site in order that TV viewers can enjoy the heart-warming vista of an empty upper tier whenever a high kick goes up - which will be every 30 seconds if the Dragons get to test the defence of Matt "Air" Utai.

All this happens, of course, in an environment in which NRL fans are constantly being told that the league is in a battle for its life with the cashed-up, aggressively expansionist AFL. Casual punters, in whose interests all these changes are apparently being made, will as a result on Friday night have the opportunity to flick their TVs between Hawthorn v Geelong at a packed MCG and Tigers v Dragons at a half full ANZ Stadium. On Saturday they can enjoy a late lunch while watching Collingwood v West Coast played in front of another 90,000 crowd at the MCG before switching over to another inter-state battle between Manly and the Cowboys – at which there will be more empty seats than occupied ones.

To be fair, if the biggest Sydney derby clash of the year can’t persuade more than 40,000 locals to drag themselves off their couches then where the match takes place is pretty much a side issue. Even so, surely it would make more sense to host Tigers v Dragons at the SFS, where there would be a decent possibility of a sellout and the great look for the league that entails, than shift the game to ANZ Stadium apparently because the final crowd figure might – but probably won’t – be a couple of thousand more than the SFS’s capacity?

The whole things smacks of short-termism from the NRL. In a month’s time league fans will no doubt start getting promotional material telling us why we ought to become club members. This will come accompanied by the usual self-flagellating articles about how Collingwood has membership numbers approaching six figures while most NRL clubs can’t even break five.

And, once again, the majority of casual to semi-serious fans will consider taking up NRL club membership and thousands of them will conclude that it isn’t worth it. As a ticketed member myself I don’t like that attitude, but with the main value of membership – getting priority access to finals tickets – effectively worthless I can understand why people take it.

The fact is that virtually no game in the NRL in Sydney sells out. Even when they do, if you can be bothered to book tickets online more than a day or two in advance, you will get in. If it looks like a crowd is going to be anywhere near capacity at a finals game, the NRL will just move the game to ANZ Stadium or the SFS anyway, ensuring that the stroll up punter still doesn’t need to go out of their way to ensure attendance.

I don’t understand why every half-hearted bandwagon jumper gets the divine right to rock up to one game a season and assume they can get in. If 2,000 people can’t get tickets for Tigers v Dragons at the SFS, so far as I’m concerned that’s a positive outcome. Maybe next season they’ll think about buying a membership (or supporting Souths, where they won't have to worry about whether or not they can get finals tickets). And if they decide to switch their supposed allegiance to the new AFL team in Sydney, well that’s also positive: good luck to that team building a long-term fan base out of people who only want to show up to finals.