Melbourne Storm are confident of getting a healthy crowd for their grand final rematch at AAMI Park despite an NRL scheduling bungle that sees it go head-to-head with the AFL season-opener next door.
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While the two best teams of 2017 square off and Melbourne league fans get to see retiring North Queensland great Johnathan Thurston live in action for the last time, AFL is hogging the spotlight.
Over 90,000 are expected to swarm to the MCG to watch AFL champions Richmond unfurl their premiership flag as they take on Carlton.
While that's out of the ball-park for an NRL match, Storm boss Dave Donaghy doesn't believe the AFL will impact too heavily on his team's game against the Cowboys.
He did concede he would have preferred a Friday night game rather than Thursday.
"From where we sit at the moment ticket sales have been really strong," Donaghy said.
"Ideally, the Friday night would have been a more preferable outcome but we're not in control of that so we've been working hard to build a crowd for what's going to be a really good game of footy."
Against Wests Tigers last Saturday night the NRL champions drew 18,189, which was their biggest ever crowd for an opening home game.
But with no AFL to battle against, even more would have been expected had they taken on their fierce rivals in the Cowboys.
Donaghy said the Storm already had 22,000 members and were tracking for 25,000 this season, and ranked second in the NRL for average crowds.
He felt they were holding their own.
"Last week was a really strong start to the year from a crowd perspective but you'd hope that you're going to get some stronger crowds this year off the back of the premiership last year," he said.
Australian Associated Press
