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Monday night football wasn’t the reason the Boomtown Rats wrote I don’t like Mondays.
But the chorus of the song sums up the majority of views on Monday night football.
High-profile media personalities, the players and even die-hard fans all expressed their feelings on the issue.
Despite being a St Kilda fan myself, and someone who loves watching any game of footy, I made the decision on Monday morning not to attend the game.
Then, late in the afternoon I was offered a medallion club ticket, so I accepted.
The whole way through the match I kept thinking to myself that I was glad I didn’t waste my money on buying a ticket.
The atmosphere – or rather the lack of it – was another strong sign that Monday football’s time is up.
Yes, it’s kudos to the AFL for making the effort to experiment and trial different things in a bid to make our great game even better.
Though every experiment leads to a conclusion and for this experiment it’s that Monday night football doesn’t work.
The big point is the declining crowd numbers. Crowds have dropped from 42,866 in 2010, to 26,078 on the Monday night just gone.
That’s a drop of 16,778 over five years. The AFL has used many excuses to defend this decline, but the stats don’t lie.
There are many reasons as to why Monday night games haven’t been successful.
Firstly, it’s almost impossible for most parents to take their children to a weeknight football match which doesn’t finish until close to 10pm.
Add to that the number of young and middle-aged people who have just struggled through Monday after a big weekend.
Then, on top of that you go from the kids, right to the other end of the scale – the elderly.
For basically the same reason as the kids, the elderly will stay at home.
They don’t see Monday night footy being worth going out in the cold for, or to catch public transport late at night for.
So of course a majority of people would prefer to stay at home, but unfortunately for them, unless they have Foxtel, they won’t be watching the game.
The match was only aired on Foxtel and not on free-to-air television, which caused uproar.
That money-driven decision by the AFL put one of the last nails in the coffin of Monday night football.
The other nails were hammered in by the AFL’s failure to make Monday night football more appealing.
Sure Monday isn’t really anyone’s favourite day, I’ll pay that, but there was little to no effort made to try and make the fans flock to the game.
If you look around at some of the other rival sporting codes in Melbourne, you’ll see them using their imagination and innovative ideas to attract big crowds.
When Cricket Australia holds matches during the week or just wants to put more bums on seats, it will opt to give the match a theme or make it a fancy dress code.
Over at AAMI Park the Melbourne Storm has to try and bring in big crowds on a Monday night sometimes as well.
So does it just sit back and hope for some reason people will decide to head along and watch rugby league on Monday night? Of course not.
One of the Storm’s ideas to lure in more people to watch is by making it ‘Monday Mates Night’.
This is where they make it a 2-for-1 general admission entry offer and also run a promotion for a 2-for-1 movie pass as well.
The AFL didn’t try any of these tactics.
The AFL put Monday night matches in the fixture, and persisted with it, but never made any real attempt to make it work. And it’s shown.
Newly appointed chief executive Gillon McLachlin has already signalled his preference for Thursday night football over Monday night football.
And Gill, just quietly, nearly everyone else agrees with you. Just scrap Monday night football and let’s play Thursday night instead.
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