This is exactly the same as taking crowds that hover around 10 thousand, and try to put them into a 80 thousand stadium. It does not work, you have to build gradually.
This is why Sydney fails at growing the code, they dont have a razzle dazzle 50 thousand stadium the western teams can use to build crowds.
Queensland rugby league did exactly the same dumb mistake, they tried to put Origin tickets up 100% and they are now paying the cost of hurting loyal fans.
I have a solution to not only ticket prices, (grow them slowly) , and how to keep game 3 full every year.
Again it is the marketing and scheduling department, the growing of the game which has been neglected since superleague, that needs to step up to the plate.
Sack them, and bring in a new department that can solve these problems.
A simple solution to origin is a game every 10 days. First game starts Monday night, second game 10 days later on the normal Wednesday night, and the third game finishes 10 days later on the Friday night.
So the third game allows for parents with kids, new fans, and people who cant make a mid-week game open to turning up for a Origin game. That will ensure a packed game 3 crowd.
This also shortens the Origin period to just 2 weekends of lost NRL games without Origin players.
The people in charge of rugby league are the problem, not the fans or the game itself.
They also need to bring in the captains challenge so the ref stops sending all the tries to the video man. Its killing the games atmosphere, same as a 10 thousand crowd in a 80 thousand stadium kills our atmosphere.
When is someone with brains going to step up to the plate and fix our code, which never seems to make a good decision, this is the code that took 3 years of complaints to change the cornerpost ruling, look at the spectacular tries scored since they removed this dumb rule.
I give up.
