TBF the free tickets are for the Port game, not for the one just played against the Pies

The GWS fuckup is going exactly how I planned, spoke over many years. There were more calling wood fans than you could poke a stick at, the collingwood fans screamed louder. They have the same issues as Gold Coast United, just GWS is a massive financial output, with only a slim margin of success...

If TV viewerships don't increase dramatically and more particularly within western Sydney by the next tv deal, the liability of the club will see the shifting of it to Canberra. Particularly if the discrepancy between crowds in Canberra and crowds in Homebush becomes a 20-30 per cent difference...

FFS Egan... Do you try to be this stupid, or does it come naturally to you?

Nobody, I'll repeat that for you particularly, NOBODY, expected GWS to be a success in the first season. Everyone involved in the project (including the AFL) has a ten year MINIMUM plan for the team. Assuming the Giants can keep the bulk of this team together, they will start to win a lot of games in 4-5 years. Watch the crowds rise when that happens. I predict that by 2020, Giants crowds will average in the mid-high teens - which will be deemed acceptable by the powers that be.

Canberra will not have a standalone team in the AFL in my lifetime - it's just not big enough from a corporate support point of view. And that's essential in the AFL.

But Egan didn't just predict it. He *planned* it. That's how tops he is.

Collington 174 v GWS 54

And as was pointed out by the commentators on the day, GWS were actually outplaying Collingwood for the first 10-15 mins of each quarter. It's just their fitness level that's costing them at the moment. Give them another couple of seasons to mature their bodies and ramp up their fitness/endurance and they'll be handing the floggings out, not receiving them.

Well I'm glad your more optimistic than me.

The comments from people who are not going are invariably anti-cultural to GWS emmersion into that part of the country, crowds are worse nearly every week to what the AFL plans for. This is the issue for this 10 year plan people defend GWS have. The plan is already irrelevant because the starting point is 10-15% lower than they expected the starting crowds to be.

You also have some unusual expectation that the best players won't just leave the region because they come from Western Australia and South Australia in asserting that success will come to GWS. eg look at the dockers, the draft system doesn't ensure periods of success...

GWS is being seen as a cultural attack to many people in the region and in that way your expectation for crowd growth is stuck on the belief that cultural change is established over the ten year period. Will require factors outside of the AFL work for that to happen.

And Dibo, did not say nobody else predicted this...but many have been more optimistic in the level of f**k up this is for the AFL.

This is a hole to pump worthless money after worthless money and if the TV dollars don't rise over time because viewership doesn't increase...then the demands for a team that is not embraced by the community it represents lessens.

Canberra could easily fund the side through government sponsorship, particularly as the region wants to diversify its economy and grab a larger tourist segment of the region to take away it's onus away from the public sector in terms of economic drivers...different funding dynamics, but if not hosting the club, as AFL start to take away funding, market forces will force the club to move to regions that actually give a damn about the club.

I hope for the AFL I am proved wrong, but the Vietnam similarities I stated last year is still my view this year. When the AFL are constantly over-estimating the crowds that GWS should get than they are obviously going to have to re look at their ten year plan and the level of way they have to go to establish the club, which in my view becomes near on impossible currently.

The club has too many negative aspects hindering future growth IMO.

Egan, you've outdone yourself. Bravo!

Enjoy your life mate...

I enjoy it plenty, especially when I try to read some of your paragraphs out loud and burst out laughing at the mangled sentence structure.

I muse at the ways you could get it so wrong.

It makes me wonder whether you write a series of sentences out on paper, cut them up, put the starts in one hat, the ends in another, draw them out randomly and then write them down in a post for us all.

Maybe you write things down and then randomly delete words or phrases. Maybe you randomly insert words or phrases.

Or maybe you have been smoking lots of breakfast cones and impaired your short term memory, the effect of which is that by the time you're looking to end a sentence, you can't remember how it started.

It's too hard to tell, but I thank you for the joy it brings me when I get to belly laugh my way through another essay.

Keep up the good work.

Hugs and kisses,
Dibo

Good on you for getting enjoyment that way Dibo.

Also let me know next time you ever agree with anything I say. Then I'll believe the previous spill that you get such enjoyment from poor grammar.

Because you use this forum to attack viewpoints more than you use it to criticise my grammar...it's either your way or the highway for you mate and most of your attacks on me come from the views I espouse rather than that PR spin you just mustered up...

This man doesn't mince his metaphors.

One would expect that a team that is superior for 50-75% of the game to post a score that is close to the team that actually won the match

I don't know why Egan goes on about GWS crowds.....they drew more than Cronulla did that night

Yeah, boba fett is exaggerating it a bit. At no stage could they be said to have outplayed Collingwood, apart from the occasional passage of play. The word he was looking for was 'competitive'. They were competitive for the first 10-15 mins of each quarter, and became a rabble after that.

Bottom line is that no team, no matter what the sport, that's as bad as GWS are are going to draw decent crowds. Like I wrote on bigfooty, I reckon the AFL should put the wallet away, cop the sh*t for the poor crowds for the next 18 months and save the dollars for their 3rd year when they're actually competitive. Trying to promote the garbage that they're serving up at the moment is going to be counterproductive. Nothing hurts a sh*t product more than good promotion.

Serious question: Has there been a sporting team in an Australian national league that's as bad as GWS are now?