I thought Shuey was a worthy North Smith Medallist. He was on from the start of the game, when most of his team were not, and drove them forward with his hard running and prodigious kicking all game. I thought Sheed was a close second, for similar reasons, and McGovern was very important. I am not sure I would have had a Magpie in my votes, despite leading for most of the game. The Norm Smith voting panel all went with Adams, except Longmire who went with Langdon. Langdon was very good but gave up that important contested mark to Ryan late in the game.
Let's not forget that the vast majority of those 66,000 people in attendance will always be barracking for the Victorian team meaning that non-Victorian supporters will always be outnumbered in the most important game of the year. The supporter numbers are more likely to be:
Victorian - 60,000.
Interstate - 30,000.
Meh - 10,000.
34000 tickets end up with members of the competing teams. I’d say a proportion of corporate tickets end up in the hands of supporters (who aren’t members) and members who aren’t successful with the ballot.
The priority isn’t squeezing in non-supporters, it’s selling tickets. They don’t care who gets them, as long as they’re sold. Supporters will endeavour to buy onsold tickets (hopefully not at scalped prices - though it’s naive to think that doesn’t happen).
There are a lot of club supporters who go to the came, you are not wrong. Problem yesterday, and I was at the game, was that Magpie supporters hugely outnumbered Eagles because the game was thousand of kilometres from Perth, the home city of the higher ranked team. Absurd and unfair.
There is a certain irony when there have been complaints on here about supporters of the participating clubs not getting tickets and criticism of it being unfair, when a complainer was at the game and wasn’t a supporter of either team.
I’m discounting the fact you probably barracked for the Eagles on the day, more that there was an actual Eagles supporter or member standing outside begging for a ticket when there was a Swans supporter enjoying the game.
That being said, I think that anyone who has access to a ticket and can afford a ticket & wants to attend should be able to. I don’t advocate scalping. I don’t advocate no shows. Every seat should be filled as there are always people who miss out so for someone (probably a MCC member) to just not turn up is a waste.
BUT your argument is valid. I was hoping to find some figures to refute it. However, in 2018 West Coast have 80K members, Collingwood 75K. In 2017 a Roy Morgan poll estimated West Coast had 669K supporters. Collingwood had 663K. With a fairly even supporter and member base, you would hope for a fairly even distribution of support amongst the crowd.
Perhaps what would be useful next year would be to have upon entry, each attendant indicate if they are a member and/or supporter of the participating clubs, or a supporter for the day for either, out just attending & have no preference. It’d be pretty easy to just have a touch screen as they scan their tickets. I’d have thought that would be either interesting and/or useful info for the AFL.
Got a ticket in the MCC ballot so ended up using it. Could have transferred it to a fellow MCC member and was going to do so if Richmond or Melbourne made it. Don't have any West Coast friends (unsurprisingly) in the same boat but gladly would have done the same. See the point about the irony but this should have been an Optus Oval Perth problem, not a Melbourne MCG problem. Simple home ground entitlement as per every other major competition on the planet. By the way, and I'm not sure it was you who used the word to be fair to you, protesting about something so blatantly unfair is not whinging, no matter how long a signed contact's time frame.
This makes yesterday even better!
Collingwood were dudded by umpires, says Leigh Matthews
Don't recall a similar article by Matthews after the 2016 Grand Final, however.
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Well said!
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