{"id":662971,"date":"2026-05-11T02:17:15","date_gmt":"2026-05-11T02:17:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/662971\/"},"modified":"2026-05-11T02:17:15","modified_gmt":"2026-05-11T02:17:15","slug":"baulking-and-running-away-afl-urged-to-re-think-mothers-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/662971\/","title":{"rendered":"“Baulking and running away”: AFL urged to re-think Mother’s Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

The fixture for Mothers Day didn’t provide fans with much excitement to close off Round 9 – and is the AFL<\/a> missing a trick by ensuring it is a footy dead zone?<\/p>\n

The Demons faced off against the Eagles at Marvel Stadium on Sunday, and the Tigers played the Crows at the MCG in front of a measly 22,000 supporters. The AFL<\/a> has for several years avoided scheduling games of note.<\/p>\n

Speaking on the Six Points<\/a> AFL<\/a> podcast, Mark Stevens believes the AFL<\/a> should be doing more with Mother’s Day.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat are the AFL<\/a> doing with Mother’s Day? They’re sort of baulking and running away from it,” Stevens said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, they are ignoring, they don’t want to be involved in it, crab walking backwards, I think they need to start celebrating it, because yesterday, they put on really crappy games to try and hide the footy away.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are in prime footy season in May, 22,000 in the Richmond game versus Adelaide, and you look on the AFL<\/a> website today, TBC, to be confirmed Melbourne versus West Coast at Marvel.”<\/p>\n

\u201cThe crowd, how could they not give us a sum, through the years, right through the 70s, 80s, always get a crowd number. Is there something wrong with the turnstile, diddling with the figures, but either way, probably 20,000 there at the most, that’s 42,000 on both games.”<\/p>\n

Stevens believes a club should take charge and celebrate the day.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to now embrace it. Is there a club out there that can say, let’s have the world’s biggest Mothers Day lunch, let’s celebrate Mothers Day,” Stevens said.<\/p>\n

“There are so many other things that football clubs do to try and make a buck, or get people to the footy, Mother’s days are a wipe out, so at the moment we may well have the day off, they never used to be this way.”<\/p>\n

\u201cSo at the moment, the AFL<\/a> have a decision to make, let’s just have the whole day off then if they think it’s not worth having footy, because you can’t lose momentum in May.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The fixture for Mothers Day didn’t provide fans with much excitement to close off Round 9 – and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":662972,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,85],"class_list":["post-662971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-afl","tag-afl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-football-league","tag-australianfootballleague","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=662971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662971\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/662972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=662971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=662971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=662971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}