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The Rolling Stones rocked Auckland on Sunday night leaving fans
happy with their music but disgruntled with the venue.
Hundreds left the Western Springs arena before the show finished
saying too many were jammed into the stadium and that crowd control
was a shambles.
"It's great to be back here, I don't know but someone told me it's 11 years to the day that we played this place," Mick Jagger told the crowd.
Eleven years on, it was the same venue, but an extra 10,000 people had been squeezed in. Many of those were left with little satisfaction.
"Bloody shambles. We paid $100 each and we got planted up in the pine trees, where we got shifted two or three times. It was just absolute chaos," one concert goer said.
"It was great except for it was pretty crowded," another added.
There was no dispute the Stones still had it, but when it came to 54,000 fans seeing what they had, organisers admit there were problems.
"Yes there was, up on this hill we had some issue where it was just very hard for people to move through," said Western Springs manager Dave Stewart.
"So there was a time there when we had a little bit of gridlock."
Enough gridlock for an exodus of hundreds of fans halfway into the show.
"There's always obviously with an event this size and of this nature a lot to learn," Stewart says.
"If you're not learning things as you go through then you'd need to have a good hard look at what you're doing."
Organisers still believe they could have filled the stadium to 60,000 and say 75,000 were packed in for the Bee Gees last year.
The Stones play Wellington on Tuesday night but to a smaller crowd of about 35,000.
