glad your slip of the finger in a single letter ommission from the word ‘count’ left out the ‘u’ and not the other way around on the vowels,

“Mungrel up country punt” anyone?

or from “The Sound of Music”

the classic line from Mother Superior to Maria : “What is it you can’t face?”

So, running at 97.74% of last year, and 98.27% of 2007.

Nothing to be sneezed at – for sure.

Best round 22 crowd over those 3 years too.

But I have some sympathy for the Roar editors because otherwise, a reply function does have a lot of merit.

Hopefully the ARL & NRL are lobbying hard for the project to be resurected. Particularly given they are now throwing bucket loads of cash on stimulus package – a lazy $10m on such a culturally worthwhile project should be top of the list.

Were there any more details on the proposal – such as location etc? Something similar to what they have in the George Hotel in Huddersfield would be a start.

…and I don’t favour the new “reply” format either – impossible to keep track of the debate (the longer ones anyway).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx_Wa-hpbjI

Champange Roar-ing.

A war is definitely needed on Masterchef and its sole crushing stable mates. The perfect weapon in this is war is the return of mid week footy. This has been long overdue. You cannot tell me dad would give up the remote if his team was playing. Who knows this may even encourage him to get home early and take the family to the game.

Would like to acknowledge the contribution of the great Sean Fagan. Long may your quest to save and retell RL history be successful. A permanent home for a RL “Hall of Fame” is long overdue – surely the NSWRL could do something at Philip St. Celebration of the past is important part of any codes future.

PS I hate the new “reply” format with increasing indents on roar, it becomes impossible to read on mobile. One indent is surely enough!

it’s absolute numbers thought the turnstiles that count. A downturn in numbers at the AFL still means a healthy gate relative to other codes due to the large membership base. I went to a Lions home game v Carlton and the crowd was easily down 10k from 4 seasons ago when I last had a season ticket. Although the Lions made the mistake thinking that 3 premierships = rusted on to the point of swallowing huge ticket prices indefinitely. As soon as the A-league came along, myself and many others traded in our Lions memberships for Roar memberships @ around half the price (which showed where the football fans went when the NSL crashed). Now the FFA got involved in the Roar and the first thing they did was a massive ticket price hike, even if justified by the underlying financial position but it led to an instant drop in memberships. I don’t recognise many faces in the seats around me now and a fair few more are empty. Mind you, the Brisbane sporting public have also been the ultimate fair-weather fans so I expect the Lions numbers are back up now they’re in finals contention. No doubt if the Roar pull their digits out they will get some bounce in numbers (some intelligent scheduling such as no direct clashes with the local competition finals wouldn’t go astray either!). In summary I think there is leakage in Brisbane between AFL & Football, to a lesser degree with League and Football, but I don’t think the AFL & League are likely to have much movement between the groups. AFL had it’s own base in Brisbane prior to the Gold Coast Bears, having also lived in Sydney I can say that the grassroots is stronger in Qld than NSW (Where it is almost non-existant- most Swans fans I met were expat Qld’ers!) and the Gold Coast has a large expat Victorian population (+ a second generation most of whom wont have converted to league). I think all codes can coexist more easily in SEQ than elsewhere due to the large interstate migration that has occurred over the last 25 years.

I can’t think of one single AFL fan that has come on here even remotely suggesting that League fans will be converted to AFL en masse.

In fact, you can cont the AFL fans on the Roar on one hand.

I was merely pointing out that while a spectacular goal can have people proclaiming football as “the beautiful game”, so can a can a spectacular try have the fans of the rugby codes have them reaching for their catch phrases and an Aussie Rules goal or mark also wins people over.

Your point about Gould’s piece being hype to whip up the masses is probably right. I’ll admit I didn’t read it (probably for that stated reason), hence it wasn’t referred to.

I often wonder what would happen to the Melbourne storm if channel nine in melbourne gave them a fair go and screen matches sensibly. Melbourne people are sports fanatics and love most sports. League does very well on tv down there when screened at a good time,

AFL is a great game, probably the greatest game but its supporters are kidding themselves if they think League is going to go away and people are going to have a mass conversion to AFL. It aint going to happen. AFL when played well is wonderful, so is League. Stop bickering who is the best and be happy we have such diversity in our footy.

All has been said. Author is late to the party and says nothing that we havent heard before.

3/10

Good article. All codes will survive but you cant deny some will grow bigger than others. Look at AFL in Brisbane 30 years ago to know. Its grown 1000 fold.

Robbos
we’re rapidly reaching a point where all Australians will be able to have a taste of the Australian game – which is appropriate.

Soccer has been fully available to everyone since forever.

Someone posted somewhere that soccer has had the highest participation rates in NSW since the 1930s.

People sometimes act as if the game arrived on our shores only a few years ago.

It’s been here since forever.

As for learning about our “Sporting Heritage”, it says a lot that AFL got in first, and yet the following is still poor to this day. Maybe people prefer a different product. AFL is not for everyone.