Tallangatta and district league grand final official gate of $37,000

A bumper crowd of 7000-7500 flocked to the picturesque Sandy Creek ground last Saturday to watch Chiltern claim its maiden flag over league heavyweight Kiewa-Sandy Creek.

Gate takings of $37,000 were comparable to the most recent grand final between Thurgoona and Barnawartha in 2019.

League president Jarrod Stephenson who replaced Rex Gray at the helm over the off-season was delighted with the crowd who braved the atrocious conditions.

"It's hard to get an exact number but going off the calculations we traditionally use, the crowd was between 7000 and 7500," Stephenson said.

"The only reason I wouldn't say it was over 7500 was that quite a few people with young families decided to leave the kids at home because of the weather.

"A rough estimate we use is one kid for every adult there.

"It's certainly not close to our biggest grand final crowd but we were pleasantly surprised how big it was considering the weather.

"The gate was $37,000

"I thought 2019 was one of our biggest grand finals with 8000 plus in attendance

"So to get to where we did with torrential rain the night before and on grand final day, we are thrilled."

The grand final crowd capped a sensational finals series.

"The total crowd for the whole final series was 30,000 plus across the six finals which is massive," he said

Although the clash between the Tallangatta and Hume league deciders raised plenty of eyebrows when first announced, Stephenson felt the weather had the biggest impact on the crowd.

"I don't think the clash had and I'm not quite sure what the Hume league's numbers were.

"I think if we had a nice spring day we could have given a crowd of 10,000 a nudge.

"But I think there were plenty of people who woke up on Saturday and saw the weather and thought to themselves that I'm not going to sit through that.

"We spoke about it in the morning and we feel the people that go to both grand finals are the footy fans that aren't attached to a club.

"Those sort of people aren't going to come out in the rain anyway."

ALSO IN SPORT

Stephenson said the live streaming of the decider also proved to be a huge success.

"We had 9000 views across all grades for the day with a peak of 1100 for the senior match which is enormous," he said.

The Hume league was still waiting for EFTPOS transactions on Wednesday before releasing its official gate.

Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content: