ANZ Stadium: The temple without a soul
Roar Guru
By Steve Kaless, 8 Apr 2008 Steve Kaless is a Roar Guru
ANZ Stadium is draining the lifeblood out of rugby league one game at a time.
There cannot be a worse venue to watch rugby league and in some perverse form of torture fans are being forced to turn up to the godless place with greater and greater frequency. To be precise it is 34 times this year.
34 times! I know just how Sisyphus felt when being told to get that boulder up that hill.
Okay, I know it is all about economics but as a shrewd accounting friend of mine once said “Give me a set of figures and I can show you anything you like.”
And that is the state fans find them in.
Apparently in today’s world of economics it is more profitable to have 15,000 fans turn up on the wrong side of the city to watch a local derby than it is to 25,000 turn up at the local ground which they had been for the last 100 years.
By that logic, we should play a game on Mars, have no show up and earn a gazillion dollars. I swear I should sell the club bosses the Sydney Harbour Bridge for 100 dollars.
But if you ask those in charge of herding people into ANZ Stadium and its characterless expanses, where all romance was taken out and drowned at the nearby aquatic centre, it isn’t just about the bottom line but about “game day” experience.
It might be worth pondering for a moment the question that has had economists stumped since the first bean counter crawled out of the swamp “what is the price of a sunrise?”
Now what is the cost of “game day” experience, and is the experience they are selling us the one we want?
I would wager a sheep station that if you asked the fans who turned up to Dragons v Sharks or the Roosters v Rabbitohs derbies at the ANZ Stadium what the sort of game day experience they were after I reckon they were a long way from getting it in Homebush. In fact so far away that the former group probably wanted their experience somewhere closer to either Kogarah or Shark Park and the latter in a ground in Eastern Sydney since they were afterall battling out the Eastern Sydney derby.
Ironically, all this is happening in a season where the NRL have played a bit of jiggery-pokery with the draw to give clubs more matches they think their fans want.
Not surprisingly the matches fans want are against local rivals, the sort of rivalries born on grass hills of suburban grounds, with no cover from the rain and no meat in your pie.
The sort of matches that you come home from freezing but with victory or revenge still burning inside.
Grounds like Belmore and Redfern might not have had great corporate facilities but they had heart.
Kogarah, Leichardt and Brookvale are the same, those grand old ladies might be a bit rough around the edges but they still have more dignity that this tarted up new hussy tempting the money men with her ample parking and flushing toilets.
But alas, more matches against the old enemy these days just means more trips out to Homebush, more staring at expanses of empty seats, more CCTV surveillance and more security guards to ensure you don’t act too much like fans of yesteryear.
Praise the lord, that the Tigers are looking at bucking the trend and shifting back to Campbelltown on a permanent basis.
Let’s all hope it works and the rest follow suit and we’ll leave the place to become the white elephant every post-Olympics stadium should be.
Sure it’s still better than watching it on the TV, but while rugby league at suburban grounds is pretty much better than anything, if all you can beat is TV you’ve got a fair way to go.
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LeftArmSpinner said | April 8th 2008 @ 9:30am | Report comment
Steve, and, it is a financial basket case, technically insolvent and provides a poor view of games played there.
It is being saved only by the Govt not wanting the embarrassment of a collapse and the ANZ blocking the financial rationalisation, and a partial/full write off of their debt. Do the numbers. It is carrying debt of 300M. Surely the Govt and ANZ should come clean and face the music.
The Cougar said | April 8th 2008 @ 9:33am | Report comment
Ohh, well said Steve. This is one of my biggest bugbears of modern-day sport.
What a dud stadium, devoid of any convenience or character. No one (apart from the aforementioned money men) can argue it’s a horrible place to be when there is a crowd of 25,000 or less. But even when it’s full, it takes forever to get there on the train, there’s one pub nearby, they charge for food and beer like Andrew Symonds on a flat Adelaide deck, and then it often takes 2 hours to get back into the city (and sometimes I think I’d rather spend a few weeks in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay than a few hours on the same train as Bulldogs fans).
Aren’t there massive waiting lists in hospitals in Sydney? Transform the stadium into a mega-hospital and take all big sports events back to the SFS or SCG, and NRL matches back to the ‘burbs.
Jerry said | April 8th 2008 @ 9:55am | Report comment
Just to clarify for a kiwi who can’t keep up with the sponsors – is this the olympic stadium you’re referring to, rather than the old Sydney Football Stadium?
I went to see the 2003 All Blacks vs Wales rugby world cup fixture at the (then) Telstra Stadium and thought it was a bit cavernous and souless even with 80K+ in attendance. With only 15K it would seem like playing on a crater on the moon.
Gruffalo said | April 8th 2008 @ 11:11am | Report comment
However, the NRL (and others) ensured that the local team was kicked out of North Sydney Oval and refused its promised rebirth in the $30 million stadium it helped to fund at Gosford.
The NRL and the NSW State Govt are frighteningly similar. Publically, they talk about the publi c interest or the interests of the game. In reality, their strings are being pulled by faceless names and organisations in the background.
Spiro Zavos said | April 8th 2008 @ 11:36am | Report comment
‘The NRL and the NSW State Govt are frighteningly similar …’ Perfectly correct. Since the days of Joynton Smith, Labor Lord Mayor of Sydney in the early days of rugby league and RL powerbroker for decades, the rugby league game has been the Labor Party at play. The cosy deals between the two organisations have been for their mutual benefit, but not for the voters or the league supporters.
Steve has hit the nail on the head. Tribalism is at the heart of the success of the NRL. To take this tribalism away to play matches in a stadium that Jerry eloquently describes as ‘a crater on the moon’ is an insult to the ‘working Australian families’ (so beloved in rhetoric at least by Kevin Rudd).
This is written by someone who used to take son number 1 to Kogarah Oval and watch all three matches sitting on the crowded grass terraces, often in the rain. And liking it, I think …
Michael said | April 8th 2008 @ 11:53am | Report comment
I have little to no understanding of the stadium itself as i have never been there nor do i know where its located but is there any possibility that it could be used as the home for the 18th AFL side coming into the competition?
Louise said | April 8th 2008 @ 1:14pm | Report comment
I can’t believe they rename the stadium every year. Sponsorship is important but renaming is ridiculous.
Future League said | April 8th 2008 @ 3:10pm | Report comment
Bravo, yet another dimwitted article on an authors subjective opinion.
Why your attacking the Stadium here is unknown, unles you have CCTV of Ken Edwards marching Peter Doust and Co. to the Stadium to play there matches there. In effect you have clubs under ever increasing financial pressure to come up with sustainable growth in an ever shrinking market. Added is the Poker Machine Tax and the Smaking Laws (which I applaud) what I don’t like is people coming on here to spout of about things without really thinking why they are happening.
Is it not commendable that ANZ Stadium attempts to generate business by assisting the under pressure RL clubs with guarenteed gate money? The last time these two suburbs met was at Kogarah in front of 13 tousand people. There was room for 7 thousand more?
If your going to tell me that they can’t organise a local derby to be played 20 mins from the two clubs heartlands than I am not there.
The bottom line is that ANZ Stadium is providing an opportunity for clubs to genberate additional GUARENTEED revenues to off set the problems faced from exitig revenues being crippled.
Rugby League is notorious for it’s self harm techniques, well mark my words, the general public are sick to death of the sport being beaten down and are voting with there feet. Channel 9′s Friday night Football is being beaten by Harry Cooper on 7 in Sydney at the moment, and I beleive people are just beaten down by the negativity associated with the sport.
Why don’t you go to the game, SUPPORT YOUR TEAM, and zip your mouth.
treizistes said | April 8th 2008 @ 4:20pm | Report comment
Future League, you talk BS.
Week 1 NRL season
432,000 (NRL game 1 Sydney)
383,000 (Harry Cooper on 7 in Sydney)
Week 2 (Good Friday)
373,000 (NRL game 1 Sydney)
347,000 (Harry Cooper on 7 in Sydney)
Week 3
335,000 (NRL game 1 Sydney)
433,000 (Harry Cooper on 7 in Sydney)
Week 4
471,000 (NRL game 1 Sydney)
350,000 (Harry Cooper on 7 in Sydney)
Beaten once in four rounds.
I’ll give you the links to the ratings if you like.
JimC said | April 8th 2008 @ 5:54pm | Report comment
I agree with the article. It’s a shocking stadium to watch rugby league, union, soccer. The financial advantages of playing there are very short term. Clubs, with the possible exception of the bulldogs, will just alienate their supporter bases by playing there.