Cheesie, love ya work here and on the austadiums forums...but Ive been to 4 games at skilled this year including this one... and bdgs is wrong
I can't concur with the bare assertion he made at the start of this argument that (WTTE) the numbers reported for Skilled Park were right (because I do not have any independent evidence to verify it - just as I have no reliable evidence to dispute it), but I think everything else he has said is reasonable.
Arguing that numbers are faked based simply upon what appears on TV or what is observed at the ground can never, ever be conclusive. This really ought to be self evident.
1. TV only offers a good view of three quarters of the ground. The quarter of the ground that contributes most to crowds is either not shown or shown very sparingly.
2. Making a guesstimate of partially fill stands is very difficult. You have to consider a lot more than the amount of obviously empty or full seats. Distribution of patrons etc has a large impact.
3. At any given time any number of people are away from their seats. There's no reason to expect that this number is proportionate to the size of the crowd.
4. Some parts of the ground are out of sight from the camera. We all know how empty the SFS looks on a rainy day as every hides in the top rows of the lower tier where they can be undercover.
5. Hills and other general admission areas are particularly hard to judge.
The other point is that there is no way of verifying the comparison figures to independent sources. If you say "Game A can't be 20k because Game B was 18k and looked more full" you're relying on the reported figure for Game B. If you could overcome points 1 to 5 above you may be able to say that it is likely that one or both of Game A and Game B has been misreported but no more than that because neither crowd has been indepently verified.
