Posted by Rohan on 17:11:12 08/08/02:

From AFL.com.au -

Colonial Stadium boss Ian Collins maintains the ground will be fit to host Sunday’s AFL clash between St Kilda and Geelong despite requesting the start time be pushed back by more than an hour to enable the ground to recover from Saturday night’s wrestling extravaganza.

The Cats-Saints match will now start at 3.15pm on Sunday instead of 2.10pm with the gates to open at 1pm instead of midday.

More than 55,000 wrestling fans are expected at Colonial Stadium the previous night for one of the biggest events the ground has ever staged with thousands of fans to be actually sitting on the ground’s already much-maligned surface.

And while Collins is confident the ground will be fit to host the Saints-Cats match, the AFL Players’ Association will not give its go-ahead for the crucial round 19 match to be staged at Docklands until they inspect the ground on Sunday morning.

The AFLPA’s main concerns are the possibility of the playing surface being filled with holes – which could potentially cause players to suffer injuries such as a twisted ankle – as a result of thousands of seats being placed on the ground surface as well as the prospect that ground staff will not be able to remove all rubbish – which could even include broken glass and cigarette butts – from the field.

The AFL is also closely monitoring the situation with the league’s football operations manager Andrew Demetriou inspecting the ground on Thursday afternoon as ground staff was readying the ground for the wrestling.

Collins said the main reason for the game time being pushed back an hour was that it enabled the gates to be opened at 1pm instead of midday to give ground staff an extra hour to clear away the enormous amount of equipment involving in staging the wresting.

“It’s just that it (the wrestling) is a fairly big production and there will be a lot of moving of equipment and a fair bit of transportation going on outside the ground and it could have impacted on people getting to the stadium (for the football) and car parking.”

“We could have met the earlier deadline (a midday opening for a 2.10pm start) but we didn’t want the two events getting tangled up so we thought it was best to give ourselves an extra hour.”

However with the wrestling not expected to finish until past 11pm on the Saturday night, Colonial Stadium ground staff will still have less than 14 hours to not only dismantle and move away all the equipment but clean up after more than 55,000 wrestling fans.