There won’t be a crowd to roar at the opening bounce of the 2020 AFL season at the MCG, but it will get pretty loud in lounge rooms across the country when Richmond’s clash with Carlton gets underway.

Amidst the coronavirus crisis that continues to grip the planet, the AFL grappled with whether to go ahead with their season and finally did so just 24 hours out from Thursday night’s opener.

But it will be a season like no other, with fans locked out for the foreseeable future.

“The game is the same,” Tigers coach Damien Hardwick said.

“The ground doesn’t change, there’s umpires, there’s players.

“The (lack of) crowd will certainly have an impact from an atmosphere point of view, but it’s nothing we can control, so our guys will just bring their best footy.”

Richmond made two changes to their premiership line-up, with Jack Graham and Sydney Stack into the side after Brandon Ellis left for Gold Coast and Bachar Houli sustained a calf injury at training on Tuesday.

For Carlton, co-captain Sam Docherty will play his first match since round 23, 2017, after overcoming two knee reconstructions, with Jack Martin (Gold Coast) and Jack Newnes (St Kilda) to make their club debuts.

“The players were probably preparing to run out there in front of 80 or 90,000 people and all of a sudden there’s going to be (none),” Blues coach David Teague said.

“Hopefully it will be back to their junior days when they had to kick off the dew and there weren’t too many people there.

“We’ve talked to our players and done some work mentally around what it’s going to be like running out onto the MCG with it empty.”

Eddie Betts, Charlie Curnow and Harry McKay were among the key players to miss through injury for the Blues.