From leaguehq today (smh)
Clubs bank on success at ANZ Stadium but fans remain short-changed
March 12, 2008
NRL clubs will play their money-spinning matches at Homebush Bay, but bigger is not always better, writes Andrew Stevenson.
Instead of leaving the season's draw to the hands of fate, the NRL has broken the mould this year in an effort to manufacture more of the games we like and less of the ones we don't need.
A complete subservience to equity was abandoned in favour of bums on seats (and couches), with clubs asked to nominate the match-ups that suited. Not surprisingly, the match-ups that suit clubs are the same ones that suit fans: more fans means more money.
The hand-of-god approach ensured Souths play the Roosters twice this year. Appropriately, in the centenary year, the foundation clubs have been accorded the honour of continuing league's most enduring stink and kicking off the season.
But the NRL's capacity for intervention goes only so far. The two clubs, tenants in common to Sydney's eastern suburbs, have rubbed shoulders unhappily for 100 years, as have their fans. So where are they playing? At the purpose-built 40,000-seat stadium that sits pretty much on the dividing line of their respective patches of turf?
No way. Instead, every fan from Sydney's east eager to claim their place at the edge of the stage when the Roosters attempt to turn Craig Wing into a plucked chicken has to hoof it out to Homebush Bay to a stadium built for the Olympics and better suited to Australian football or cricket.
Whatever crowd the game manages to draw, we can already say two things about it with certainty. It won't fill the stadium, not by a long shot, and it will be smaller than the crowd the game would have drawn to the Sydney Football Stadium.
The NRL's preparedness to intervene in the draw this year to ensure more local derbies, to guarantee the three Queensland teams play each other twice, should serve - along with the centenary bells and whistles - to boost crowd averages this season. It's modelled on the AFL's approach but only so far. Whereas the AFL employs a "best fit" policy to maximise crowd numbers by directing where games should be played, the NRL will remain silent on this issue.
"We are happy for clubs to play their games at venues where they think they are going to be most successful and most profitable," explained Graham Annesley, the NRL's chief operating officer.
In other words, whereas the AFL plays big brother, the NRL stays mum. The issue is complicated by the fact that profitability for clubs means more than just bums on seats. It's what those bums are wearing that counts. The ANZ Stadium, Homebush Bay, offers a host of corporate suites and revenue guarantees allowing club's to maximise their earn, even if total crowd numbers might be lower. The stadium will host the lion's share of NRL games in Sydney this year, with 34 club games, two Origins and finals matches, including the grand final already booked in.
But it will be full for only - and then only possibly - three of those games. At other times the sound of a spectator coughing on a cold night will echo around the empty stands. And, unlike the SFS, where the crowd sits close enough to get sprayed with sweat, and occasionally other bodily fluids, ANZ Stadium always feels as though a running track remains between spectator and player.
Annesley defends it. "It does come in at the side so it can be turned into a rectangular playing field and, although it's a multi-purpose venue, it's the largest capacity venue in this state and Queensland."
But a big ground is not a great ground for league. The SCG was the code's spiritual home but it's a shocking place to watch any football, except of the southern variety. Could it be that one reason why league has never dominated the psyche of the city in the way Australian Rules rules does in Melbourne is that Sydney didn't get its first decent stadium to watch it until 1986? Parramatta Stadium brought the crowd and action together, a trend continued by the SFS in 1988. Whereas the old stadia were shared by two codes (league and cricket) that didn't fit well together, the new ones work perfectly for league, rugby and soccer.
The AFL has its sights on Sydney's west - open the door to ANZ and let them try and fill it with a second Sydney side. The A-League, too, will have to find space for a second side from the nation's biggest city. A western Sydney Super 14 team is also inevitable. Surely it's time for the three codes to sit down and talk and get lobbying, together, for what the city's sporting fans need: a 35,000-seat rectangular stadium in the city's west.
http://www.leaguehq.com.au/news/news/banking-on-anz-stadium/2008/03/11/1205125911684.html
