The 8:30 kick off was definately a factor for families, as was the public transport or lack thereof from the Northern Beaches. The fact is though, that we still managed to get over 19K to 2 v 7 finals in 07 against Souths and 08 against Illawarra, both of which also kicked off at 830pm.
Both those teams obviously have a better following in Sydney than the Cowboys, but I don't remember seeing many of their fans at Brookie on those 2 nights. Maybe the same public transport issues are also relevent in reverse. Based on all 3 games kicking off at the same time I don't think we can really blame the time.
The real question is, was it just public transport issues that stopped the same Manly fans who turned up at 830pm in 07 & 08 from getting to the game on Saturday or do people who say we generally wont travel more than 20km have a point?
Also, it was a finals game and 4 of the 10 people in our group were at their first game for the year. I would have thought there may have been a few others making a special effort for the big games (ala 08 GF when we more Manly fans showed up than I knew even existed) but obviously I was mistaken.
We now have 2 weeks notice that we are playing Friday 23rd at SFS or ANZ (even harder to get to for most of us) so we better get on to all our fellow Sea Eagles fans and encougage them to get there.
Those who were there made plenty of noise but we need more to try and replicate the atmosphere we had at Brookie v the Storm. Every crowd penalty is going to be crucial.