Queensland night GF bid
QUEENSLAND’S bid for the AFL grand final would include a historic 7pm first bounce it believes would provide the greatest ratings spectacle in Australian sport.
The AFL is expected to decide early next week which state will hold the grand final after hearing submissions that included a proposal from the South Australian government on Thursday.
But the league seems certain to hold a night grand final with strong support from
broadcast partner Seven and AFL boss Gillon McLachlan, who has said a twilight or night trial is “inevitable”.
The exhaustive 80-page
Queensland bid handed to the AFL on Tuesday proposes a range of twilight activities at the Gabba before a 7pm bounce that would put the game in prime time.
The league would have to rule whether the grand final had halftime entertainment, which would take as much as half an hour, or pre-match entertainment as dusk settled.
The annual grand final parade would be dead for 2020, with the bid unable to come up with a solution to contracttracing thousands of fans in Brisbane in crowds six deep along a parade route.
The league is on track for an October 24 night grand final.
The Queensland bid accepts its financial component might be less than the $35-36 million offered by West Australia.
But it has offered a “turnkey” package featuring corporate suites, grand final entertainment and a pitch to house the Brownlow Medal, Rising Star and All-Australian night at the Gold Coast convention centre.
Gold Coast Suns boss Tony Cochrane, chairman of the bid, said: “I think Channel 7 will absolutely have the biggest TV ratings of any sporting event in Australia. I think we’ll get six million eyeballs that night if it’s a night-time game on the east coast of Australia.
“The most significant impact for the first time that I can recall, is that we’ve dominated TV sports viewing on Thursday and Friday nights in Queensland.
“Our ratings in Queensland are up 30 per cent so there’s no question that we’ve had a huge impact right across the state and we want to build on that.
“We want to use the grand final to really build on that.
“We’ve got an enormous base of people taking up the game. We want to make it the game of choice in Queensland.”
The league has told clubs it will alert clubs next week about the successful bidder.
“We spoke to Richard Goyder as chairman of the AFL Commission, Gill McLachlan as the CEO and then a number of his key executives,” Cochrane said. “We ran with the slogan that we’re good to go.
“Brisbane and the Gold Coast and all of Queensland is good to go.
“We think it’s a very strong premise.”