Technically, yes the AFL did - they do the fixtures. But we agreed to it. Without definitively knowing I imagine we asked for lots of Friday night games and return games against Coll, Carl and Ess, as well as having Rich v Carl to start the season. AFL said OK, we'll give you all that, but you have to play a home game at Etihad, because we sold our soul to get it built for us and agreed to play x number of games a year there and the tenant clubs don't give us enough games. Same reason Melbourne is playing a home game against GWS there tomorrow.
My only queries are - why did it have to be against an Etihad tenant club rather than say an interstate club? and why did it have to be round 23 when the result has more significance than say round 12 in June, when it's p!ssing rain and we'd welcome a game under the roof. Melbourne copped GWS, that would have been OK by us - there were only 35k at our GWS game, so Etihad would have been fine then.
I guess the only advantage is that Norf don't play the G often, whereas we do and I'm sort of glad now we won that we didn't expose our MCG game plan.
