Why is there no justice?

It happens every year at the Grand Final that people miss out on tickets and I am really sick of it. I have heard of a pair of devoted Saints supporters who paid three hundred dollars each to see the drawn Grand Final. I gather they had to get their tickets through irregular channels. And then they forked out a similar sum, which they could afford even less, for the replay.

Now as we all know there were a few more than 100 000 people at the drawn Grand Final but only 93 000 at the replay. Chris says you could see the empty seats in the Members Stand. Get that – you could see empty seats at the Grand Final replay for which devoted fans paid sums they could not afford in order to get a ticket.

This is crap and I’m going to keep calling it crap until it ceases to be. Why should Melbourne Cricket Club members, or anyone for that matter, have a right to an empty seat at the Grand Final? Sure they can have a right to go and see the match. They’ve paid all that money and waited fifteen years to join and all the rest of it. But why should anyone have the right, effectively, to keep their seat even if they don’t go? Why should seats be empty in the Members while devoted fans miss out altogether or go into debt to buy a ticket on EBay?

Why not give the Members until an hour before the first bounce and then put all the empty seats up for grabs so that supporters of the actual clubs in the match might have a chance of seeing their team win a flag?

And I can’t let these attendance figures slide either. Back in the bad old days, when we had those substandard grandstands like the Southern and the Olympic and the Ponsford and that terrible old Members Stand that almost nobody wanted to be a be in (well, only enough people to create a fifteen-year waiting list) we used to get well over 100 000 to the Grand Final every year.

So we’ve spent $600 million on the ground in the past twenty years to reduce its capacity. Money well spent.