The Great Dane
First Grade
- Messages
- 7,970
Short answer; hard data.What constitutes "hard evidence" mate?
Long answer; surveys, membership data from the clubs, popularity rate studies from the time would be great, etc, etc. Scientific data that can actually objectively prove yay or nay, instead of air fairy BS that wouldn't even be admissible in court.
Because I knew that your only evidence would be "my uncle's mate's friend from the pub's cousin's best friend" and wanted to push the point that even as a Norths fan, whom undeniably knew lots of dyed in the wool, active, Norths fans, I couldn't come up with a single anecdotal case of a person swapping to another sport they had no prior interest in.If you didn't want anecdotes brought in why did you start with yours?
That doesn't have any baring on Norths fans of the time swapping to AFL. It's literally irrelevant to the discussion at hand.Like Junior numbers only recovered from the SL war in the Lower North shore maybe 3 years ago from the mid 1990s. The North Shore Bombers have more adult teams than Lane Cove, Brothers and Willoughby combined. It's gone from one club (North Shore a very long time) having Junior teams to Mosman and Willoughby Auskick both having most age groups in the area.
Like, did this just happen out of thin air?
What that is more indicative of is what happened after the Bears got the arse, i.e. a massive reduction of investment into the promotion of the sport and grassroots funding in the region, no direct pathway to professionalism in the region, and a niche in the market that the NRL left open for competitors to fill (which they did and nobody has ever denied that). But again that wasn't the argument.
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