FOR one weekend, the nation’s entire sporting landscape has been turned inside out and upside down.

There will be Australian football at the MCG on Saturday and rugby league at Sydney’s Telstra Stadium on Sunday. This much makes sense.

The rest has become a mad dash for planes, trains and hotel rooms, as the nation trades places for a not-so-traditional footy fix.

By last Saturday night, the prospect of Melbourne playing Brisbane in an NRL grand final in Sydney and Sydney playing a Perth team in an AFL grand final in Melbourne had been realised as a historic quirk.

By midday yesterday, it had developed into a logistical nightmare, with competition for airline tickets as furious as anything seen on the field in recent weeks.

The tyranny of distance will be most keenly felt between Perth and Melbourne. Within hours of last Saturday’s preliminary final win, West Coast Eagles supporters jammed the web to snap up high- priced fares the moment they appeared.

Qantas has set aside an extra 24 planes — or 4200 seats — to service the cross-continental route within three days of the grand final. Virgin Blue dusted off three planes to make flights on Thursday night and Friday.

By yesterday morning, every additional Virgin Blue seat had been sold. Company spokeswoman Amanda Bolger said the airline simply had no more planes to fly. It now plans to set up more connecting flights through Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane. While the last might appear to be an absurd route to get to Melbourne, West Coast supporters made it to last year’s grand final by flying through Singapore and New Zealand.

One Eagles supporter determined to fly high is 52-year-old Perth bookkeeper Alex Polglaze. Mr Polglaze travelled by bus for last year’s AFL grand final and was so confident his team would make another appearance this year he chartered two 70-seat jets at about $85,000 a pop.

He has since recovered his costs by selling about 120 seats to family, friends and fellow club members for $1450 per return ticket. “If things had gone wrong, I’d be losing my house,” Mr Polglaze said.

Qantas has also put on an extra 10 flights between Sydney and Melbourne to cater for Swans fans flying south for a tilt at back- to-back AFL premierships. Brisbane and Melbourne Storm supporters are expected to funnel into Sydney, but not in sufficient numbers to require extra flights, a Qantas spokesman said.

All this extra air travel doesn’t come cheap. The least expensive flights available last night from Perth to Melbourne on Thursday or Friday were going for $800 one way.