Rugby Australia v England

On Friday, Richard H called me and invited me to the Wallabies match against the English.

My take was the English guys were bigger than the Aussies and when they smashed their way through to score, the Aussies had a brain fade panic and didn't know what to do. 

For example, there were several penalties that went our way, most notably in the second half, that were within easy kicking distance of the goal posts. Instead of going for 3 points we persisted with the traditional approach of trying to score a try. This was despite the fact that we had 50minutes of evidence that showed we really couldn't score trys.

VENUE & CROWD MANAGEMENT 

Other observations were to do with crowd management. First observation was it seemed no one was getting in.  The queues were huge and not moving. Crowds at both ends. We could see that some people had gotten in but still the queues were not moving.   I wonder if he QR code readers crashed or something. 

Eventuality the lines started to move.   As we got closer to the turn styles we passed abandoned bag searching tables.   I suspect that the hold up was bag searching. 

When we arrived at the turnstiles   we ground to a halt again.  Every now and then a few people would get through and then it would stop.  It seems that people, having waited for over an hour, had not actually brought their ticket up on their phone.  With some bloke at the front of our queue messing about I asked if I could go past and the system worked correctly for me. 

I think they should have people stand about 2 m back from the turnstiles like we do at the airport bag drop.  You get to walk up and try your ticket, if he doesn't work or you don't have it up, the 2m gap let's you peel off to the side to a special entry with a couple of human helpers.

Actually backing up a bit,  in amongst the crowd were fences and barriers at right angle to the way were queued.  Some bright spark I think had dreamed and I do mean dreamed up crowd control.

Finally, after the match, there was a bottleneck on the northern walk way outside the stadium.   All they needed to have done was to paint a lane line to separate southbound and north bound people.