Okay, here's the general story on last year's situation. The Storm needed to improve awareness among Victorian public, so the club, NRL, and Channel 9 sat together and discussed about the best possible way to achieve this. They came up with putting Storm games every Saturday 3:00 p.m. so that Ch. 9 can show all games live with little interference to their normal programming. Saturday movies rated about the same probably, CMIIW. The hope was that more people get to watch the Storm on TV since in 2001 we had the worst year ever in terms of TV coverage.
Problem with that was channel 9 never showed any advertisement for it so no one apart from Storm fans and those with friends in the know, knew about it. The time slot was also bad as that is the same time as when families go to their kids' sporting activities. So the decision actually backfired big time. Those who were occassional supporter would watch the game on TV thinking why bother spending $15-$30 when it's live on free to air? So naturally, crowd support dropped considerably.
Plus, Storm had their worst year ever internally. Y'know, the coaching problem and the captain issue. Plus rumors were rife about moving to wherever, with our own CEO Chris Johns admitting to starting the rumor in the first place. It was probably a miracle we didn't finish as wooden spoon. Basically it was bad publicity all year round.
I don't know about this year's crowd as I'm no longer in Melbourne and only get news from the website and occasional sms from friends there.