MCC admits Queen’s Birthday blunder

MCC GM of venue events Gerard Griffin has apologised for the long time fans had to wait in line at the Queen’s Birthday clash yesterday.

The MCC gates opened at 1:00pm yesterday, giving thousands of fans just an hour to find a seat before the Big Freeze 4 slide commenced at 2:00pm.

SEN’s Whateley with Gerard Whateley can be heard Monday-Thursday 9-12am, and you can subscribe to the podcast here

“In hindsight, we would do it differently and we apologise to all those fans who were affected,” Griffin told SEN’s Whateley.

“We sit down every Monday morning and try and predict, using the history and data, the arrival pattern.

“Naturally on the back of the performances of the two teams, the excitement about the 18 coaches going down the slide, we did factor in for a bigger and earlier arrival pattern.

If you’re planning to come to #AFLDeesPies via the @MCC_Members - you better hurry up!#BigFreeze4 pic.twitter.com/NJC9NRYOka

— AFL Nation (@AFLNation) June 11, 2018

“Our factoring was still blown out of the water. We were factoring about a 25 percent increase in arrival times around that 12.30-1.30 period, it turned out to be about double that.

“Our predictions and the tactics we deployed simply couldn’t cope with those volumes. We did try and adjust at the running, but I can’t deny it, we couldn’t handle the volumes and it hindsight we would run a different model.”

Listen to Gerard Griffin’s chat with Gerard Whateley on SEN’s Whateley in the player below