It was a great day. Warm and sunny. In the Olympic Stand I was surrounded by newcomers to the game. Four Chinese visitors right next to me.

13 hours ago, Bonkers said:

There was a long line outside the membership tent 30minutes before the game so there must have been something similar happening. 

Long line is an understatement. There were hundreds of people waiting!

I'm suspicious that part of the thinking behind the 20,000 seat giveaway for this particular game was to get a crowd over 50,000 to continue to discourage the AFL from consigning us to a home game against St Kilda at Etihad ever again. I've been wondering why we would try and boost a crowd against a Melbourne-based team rather than do it when we play one of the lowly supported interstate teams. If that's part of the reason for doing it when we played St Kilda, well played, MFC.

"Only" 7,000 of the 20k free tickets were used on the day. The crowd was a big one for our 2 teams even with the 7k newbies coming along.

Come on Dees!!

Plus free donuts if you were lucky enough to snag some?

Looking at the crowd on the coverage it was fantastic, even better that they introduced 7000 people to our great game without it totally inflating the numbers. 

Great work Dees and well done to all the Dees fans for making it a loud and passionate crowd! I hope we've won a few extra fans!

The MCC members was packed to the rafters, levels 2&3 completely full and the only seats on level 4 were in the nose bleed section.

Quite a few saints supporters in the members but huge numbers of Dee's fans. And unlike 10 or more years ago, no one was asking idiotic questions e.g. "that no.2 Chappy goes well Eh!"or "golly that no.11's big". Such things used to happen!