International Women’s Day. Wonderful. The Women’s T20 World Cup final. Wonderful. Australia versus India at the MCG. Wonderful. Shafali Verma. Wonderful. Meg Lanning and Alyssa Healy and Megan Schutt and Beth Mooney and Georgia Wareham. Wonderful. A world record crowd for women’s sport. Wonderful … with an asterisk the size of the Great Southern Stand. I don’t think the record is legitimate.
An email from the Melbourne Cricket Club at 6.11pm on Thursday has included a colourful graphic. A poster. On the poster it has said, “The Final. Featuring Katy Perry.”
The excited blurb beneath it, so excited it has exclamation marks to offer a Perry-scale roar-oh-oo-woah-woah-woah-woah-oh-oo-woah, says, “Be at the MCG this Sunday as the two best teams battle it out for the ultimate glory!
If that isn’t enough, global pop superstar Katy Perry will be there to perform in the pre-match show and then return to the stage to get fans dancing in a post match one-hour concert, complete with her full band! This is our chance to break the attendance world record for a women’s sporting event. Come and be part of the celebration!”
Is it a world record for women’s sport or a world record for a Katy Perry gig? Who needs who to pull a crowd? Who will make the teeny-boppers most feel like they’re living a teenage dream. Because this is no humdrum pre-game and post-game show. It’s no quick halftime show. It’s pre-match. Post-match. With her full band! Perry’s sold 18 million albums. One-hundred-and-twenty-five million singles since her first little ditty about kissing a girl and liking it. Is she the sideshow here? Hardly.
Is she the performer who’s really pulling tens of thousands of women to the MCG? Probably. It doesn’t really matter on a day of celebration. The prizemoney pool for the Women’s World Cup, for instance, is up 320 per cent on 2018, equal to the men’s purse later this year. But the motivation of the crowd does matter when the figure will be used to paint cricket in a record-breaking light. Are they not fudging the numbers a bit here? How many tickets would be sold without Perry starting and finishing the festivities?
Ellyse Perry’s absence makes no difference to the patronage. Those desperate for the Guinness World Record to be broken will be hoping K.E.H. Perry doesn’t follow E.A. Perry in pulling a hammy. Big hits? She has more than Australia’s top order combined. She’s less Hot ‘N Cold. Pulling power? More than Healy has to a short ball from a slow-medium pie chucker masquerading as a new-ball bowler.
K.E.H Perry may like to dedicate her most famous lyrics to A.J. Healy: “You’re hot then you’re cold, you’re yes then you’re no, you’re in then you’re out …” Entertainment value? More than 50,000 tickets were sold before the World Cup finals began. When no-one knew who, apart from K.E.H. Perry, was playing. Which makes you think 50,000 of the final figure will belong to her. Can she not jump on Twitter on Sunday and boast to her 108.5 million social media followers of attracting a monster crowd in Melbourne? If so, can the cricketers do the same? Can it be both? I don’t think so.
The current world record crowd for women’s sport is the 90,185 at the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup final at California’s Rose Bowl in the USA. The biggest celebrity in attendance? Bill Clinton. Sitting in the VIP seats, not playing the sax with his full band. Every spectator was legitimately there for the soccer. The MCG can house 100,000. There will be a huge turnout of Indian fans who see S. Verma as an even greater source of love and light than K.E.H. Perry. But who will the crowd figure really belong to? Just say there’s 95,000. Put Katy Perry either side of a netball game, or a swimming meet, or a boxing match, or a poetry reading, and you’re likely to get yourself into the Guinness Book of Records.
That’s not to say the cricketers aren’t immensely and increasingly popular. They deserve all this. I just think it’s a bit rich for cricket to conveniently ignore the presence of the real rock star when the final figure is tallied. Audience numbers belong to the star billing on any given night. When Vance Joy has played to 70,000 at Sydney’s ANZ Stadium as part of Taylor Swift’s show, he hasn’t claimed the crowd as his own.
Before England’s players were left crying into their beers and lamenting the misery of Sydney weather, Anya Shrubsole told Sky Sports: “We’re going to have to be at our very best to make it to the MCG and a Katy Perry concert.”
If players are talking up the Katy Perry show as much as the T20 show, we can assume a healthy portion of the crowd are thinking the same. I’m surprised the Guinness World Records will acknowledge it. An inquiry was sent to them on Friday, there’s yet to be a reply. But if you play an NRL game at the MCG alongside a U2 concert, you’ll get a world record rugby league crowd. If you plonk an NBL court inside the MCG and have a Robbie Williams concert, you’ll get a world record basketball crowd. Get K.E.H. Perry to your next game of tiddlywinks and you’ll pack the MCG and have a world record crowd for tiddlywinks. It doesn’t make the figure for the final any less noteworthy. It doesn’t dull the roar-oh-oo-woah-woah-woah-woah-oh-oo-woah. It just blurs the real significance of the number, and the legitimacy of the record.
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