Although the Twittersphere went into its expected overdrive on Sunday night for the NRL Grand Final between the Sydney Roosters and the Manly Sea Eagles, the numbers fell well short of the mania of the previous weekend’s AFL Grand Final in Melbourne.

Total social messages hit 145,435 on Sunday for the big NRL finale, with 111,565 of those coming on Twitter. This represented 63,000 fewer messages than the AFL Grand Finals received a week previously.

The fact that two Sydney teams were in the final is said to have contributed to the lack of tweets from elsewhere around the country.

The following is a word cloud showing the location of the location of the NRL tweeters (based on a random sample of 3000 tweets:  

There were 31,860 messages at its daily peak on the 6 October.