Except the players consciously know the act is directed toward their opposition. They are acutely aware that the noise in a demonstration of the crowd support against them.Woodgers wrote: ↑February 13, 2019, 7:16 pm NRL players generally play in ZERO atmosphere. Nothing. So what do we do? We come up with something that adds atmosphere. BUT....the crowd does it when the opposition players are out there in the middle of the noise and our guys get none of it and are walking down a tunnel. How can people not understand that by doing it the way we do it it actually works in the opposition's favour and gets them pumped for kick off because they're the ones actually subject to the noise and the build up on the ground and ours aren't? It's madness. Having been involved in supporters groups including running one for the Raiders, and having been interested in crowd participation my entire life I strongly believe we actually could not be doing it in a more backward manner for our team/club to get anything out of it.
I would guess like most of this stuff, there is no correlation between this and teams performing better or worse, or us performing better or worse.
If this kind of thing has an impact, i'd say it would be isolated to individuals, some negative, some positive. I dont think there is a collective material difference in favour of either them or us... Some players thrive in combative environments, others shrink. Some players thrive when the atmosphere is behind them, others freeze under the pressure.
so to me this just comes down what works best for the crowd and the optics, and from that perspective, pre game and for games where... y'know we're not staring at a 7k crowd and trying to call it 12k
Has to be at least 15k of bodies in the crowd before they should bring it out.