It's funny how all this negativity about the crowd number is exactly what you guys hated David Dome and other Phoenix people saying about previous crowd sizes. For what's become a yearly fixture, you should not have been expecting much more than 10,000 for a game at North Harbour Stadium. Here's why:
· North Harbour Stadium is a HORRIBLE stadium. Every Aucklander knows it. It's a miserable experience from start to finish and it never changes. When there have been problems at Westpac for you guys, there's been efforts to fix them. That doesn't happen at NHS. The place doesn't even have a permanent screen! Instead, there's a tiny temporary one that kept cutting out right through the best parts of the replays last night.
· Location. I said this before in another thread. From Auckland City Centre to North Harbour is the equivalent of Westpac to Porirua Harbour. That's not going to stop some fans, obviously, but the casual ones are not going to bother. They'll likely say "I'll go next year" or "I went last year". This is especially the case for families and for people who live even further south and east. From Botany, it's the equivalent distance of Westpac to the Paekakariki Domain.
· Nowhere on my ticket did it say anything about public transport. But let's say all public transport is free. I'm lucky that I only need to catch one bus to get to Britomart, but weekend times means that leaves only once an hour and would take 40 minutes to get there. And then I would have to take the bus from Britomart to the stadium. On the way back would be even harder because I don't know how late the buses go. For anyone else further afield, that instantly rules out public transport even as a free option (which it apparently wasn't).
· Ticketmaster. Makes me angry just seeing the name. For a company that sells tickets, they a really terrible job of making it appealing. I wanted to sit on the top level for the game. "Sorry, no tickets are available". It then sticks me in block 4 as the "best available". Two hours later, I try again and suddenly I'm in block 6. I choose those, go through all the stuff, it shuts down on me. I start again, get similar tickets and finally manage to purchase them. Of course, throughout this whole ordeal, I've had to fill in three or four captchas to prove I'm human, as well as manually fill in all my details including address (despite printing at home) even though I was signed in the entire time! So was that the end of it? Of course not. Trying to print was a nightmare. No matter what settings I chose, the pages would come out wrong and print too big and cut itself off so at no point a barcode would come out. I finally though, screw this, I'll just show them on my phone. I open up the page and "This is not your ticket, please print at home". The only way I could do it in the end was by print-screen, cutting them down in photoshop, then printing them on a Word Doc.
· I didn't get any food or drinks but my brother did. He was gone for at least 15 minutes during the first half because it was apparently a complete shambles. No EFTPOS initially, then they ran out of EFTPOS receipt rolls, and this was before the half time rush.
· There needs to be more advertising. And not just in bus shelters. You have to have a car to get to the match so don't try to advertise to people using public transport! I know they're designed for drivers to see as well but it's still not enough. There needs to be targeted advertising. Krishna should be front and centre for a game in Auckland. A lot of Pacific Islanders love the game and Fijians would especially love to see one of their own play but most Pacific Islanders live south of the bridge. Places like Mangere and Manukau are even further away than Botany. You cannot expect the casual football fan to travel that far for a match. It's just unreasonable.
And honestly, after last night, I'm glad it was only 10,800. We played well and beat Melbourne which is a terrific result, but that's where the good things stopped. As a match day experience, it was far more likely to put people off. The kits would also contribute to that. I can't remember who said it in another thread but it was something about not wearing yellow and black could potentially alienate the fans. I think that's actually a fair statement after last night. I came to see yellow and black. Instead I got some ugly drab grey kit with no warning or explanation. If I didn't recognise the players, I wouldn't have known who was who. It makes two horrible kits in a row now for Auckland too. Last year, we got the Hobbit one.
