"The 50,668 crowd at the Eels-Wests Tigers game smashed the record for a Premiership match between the two teams (previously 34,272 in 2009).
It was also Parramatta's biggest home game crowd in 50 years and the biggest crowd at a match this year.
Attendance at the Eels-Wests Tigers game was the fifth highest Premiership crowd ever in Sydney (excluding double headers)." NRL.com
The notion that a big club should be happy with a 15 000 strong crowd at the local stadium is not the future despite how much we like fortress Parra Stadium. We need to learn how to win at ANZ and turn it into a bigger fortress because there is not going to be a 30 000+ seat Parra Stadium anytime soon, it seems.
Imagine Parra playing in front of 30-40 000 fans on a regular basis. Not withstanding the result on Monday, the crowd feel was great and Parra fans were out in force. Hopefully they will bring the seating closer to the sidelines to make it a better football stadium.
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Are you oblivious to the fact that The Easter Show was on? It was a big part of so many fans being at the game. It was obviously a great windfall for the club but I'd still rather the game at Parramatta. Imagine 22,000 Eels fans baying for blood. The issue was half the crowd were Tigers supporters and getting out of the game was horrible. I was waiting more than half an hour for a train back to Granville.
Correct super, thats the only reason there were 50k of fans there, would have been half that any other occasion v the tigers, in fact id like to hear the stats on the last 5 years on crowds between the two clubs.
Fair point but Parra fans outnumbered the Tigers fans easily and made a lot more noise. Twinning it with the Easter show was great for attendance as about 60% of tickets were family tickets.
I love Parra Stadium but we there was only about 15000 there for the Roosters game and we dont get 22000 at Parra Stadium often.
Parra's catchment and following are huge, ANZ is in Parra territory and with the team offering hope this year its time to think big- at least for some games.
I agree ...we need to learn how to win at ANZ.
I'm not denying it wouldn't have drawn a decent crowd without the Easter Show but we probably wouldn't have been looking at more than 30K. It would've near sold out at Parra given we drew more than 15K to the game against the Roosters when it was bucketing.
Last year was the first year Parra/Tigers didn't sell out at Parra for many years - it's always the number one drawing game at Parra.
What we can take out of the last five years is that we have approximately between 10k and 35k as the possible number of supporters who are likely to turn out to a match. The fact we were generally doing 10k through our worst possible run tells you there are about 10,000 supporters who will show up to every Eels home game. 35k would be pretty close to how many Eels supporters showed up to all of our biggest matches - stretching back from the 2009 Bulldogs final, the Hindmarsh/Burt finale through to the most recent Easter blockbuster.
As such, clearly the best result for Parramatta is to get a 32k capacity Parramatta Stadium. That would pretty much accommodate all Parra fans even for the biggest clashes and allow us to maintain the home ground atmosphere.
To increase those base numbers significantly your looking at a decade. You need to bring the kids through into regular football goers, because adults seldom suddenly change their habits in this regard.
Or do uou think it never would've even came to that because Parramatta would've been much more pumped up for the game on home soil than what they were at Homebush and would've just steam-rolled the tigers fluke artists scum bags for the full 80 minutes ?
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