BigPowerForward
Mark of the Year contender
Putting the way we played aside, I enjoyed the Shanghai experience. The heat was difficult to deal with though. My wife spent the 2nd half behind the grandstand in the shade and I ended up wearing the portable seat on my head to give me some shade. I think it is a good initiative by the club. Lots of people around me were new to the game and seemed to be enjoying the experience.I was sitting in that temporary stand behind the goals and most of it was reserved for the people in the marquee in the centre of the picture and they chose to stay in the shade, eat and drink and watch the big screen rather than sit in the sun. Although a few did smuggle some drinks out, alcohol was not supposed to be removed from the tent. There was another marquee at the other end of the ground which I assume had similar arrangements.
That said, the stadium did look half empty which is something they do need to address. Not sure how they can do that as there is no shade other than a small seating area on one of the wings.
The conditions we fairly bad. Quite hot and humid but not as bad as Shanghai can be. No doubt Billings and Savage were not right to play. JB standing on the goal line for the first bounce was not a good sign. I suspect with Marsh and DMac out we needed to have Savage (and Gears for that matter) play to try to bolster the defence. I wonder if others were ill too but we just didn't have enough bodies to replace them.
Don't lose heart. We will be better for the experience and will learn from the mistakes of this year. No use whinging about it anyway. We're playing in Shanghai the next two years. If you don't want us to sell home games, then turn up to our home games at Marvel. Make it impossible for the club to sell home games because we make so much money even when we play against interstate opposition. I don't wanna hear "I'd go if we played better". Maybe if we had 10,000 extra fans or 5,000 extra fans cheering us on at Marvel maybe we would play better. It's a bit of a chicken/egg situation. What does come first?