SteV

How did you get a ticket for Brentford!? ??

Technology will eventually be the answer in one form or another. It’ll take time like, and how you go about linking things up with what’s available at away grounds, especially smaller clubs, I have no idea, but it will happen one day.

Bit of a contentious point that one tbh. Does the son have a right to those points just because his dad has been going for years? Some will say yes, others no.

Yeah, I saw that. Obviously isn’t full proof by any stretch, but the punishments they’ve brought in for flouting it seemed like quite severe (10 game ban), so could at least make people think twice. I personally think the way forward is e-tickets that can only be downloaded to one specified device. Not advocating doing that any time soon, and people will say ‘what about fans that don’t have smartphones’ etc, but I feel like that’s the eventual destination of travel with this.

The only way the can bring in ID checks is if they do it on a random basis. So say 200 tickets get kept back for collection with ID at the away box office on a random basis. You simply couldn’t do all 3k or it would just be chaos and you’d have to turn up two hours before ko. If you were wanting to actually ID people as they went through turnstiles, you’d need to provide additional staff, and again I think you’d see massive queues. I totally get your overall point, but I think we need to be careful that in the quest for ‘fairness’, we don’t negatively impact the away day experience too much.

Exactly. When you’ve just dropped £100m on two young central midfielders, it would seem fairly ridiculous to spend the same, if not more, on someone else in that position. Maybe there’s an argument once Kroos or Modric finish, but until that point they aren’t going big on a central midfielder.

It’s interesting that McClaren was probably the most likeable (or least unlikable) of that lot, yet he probably did the worst job of anyone considering circumstances and players at his disposal. *not really counting Kinnear as that was all just madness

Chelsea tickets on sale this morning

Heads up the TV picks for December and January are supposed to be announced on Tuesday. Obviously there’s lots of people travelling back home and stuff over the festive period so get ready to finalise your plans (and hope they don’t decide to change things with about two weeks notice…)

Don’t think it’s ever been officially released anywhere, but mid thirties would seem a sensible estimate.

Yep. You kind of assume Liverpool and Man Utd are like 80/90% ST holders but I believe the reality is actually nowhere near that. Think I read Villa actually have the highest % of capacity as ST in the PL. Although can’t remember the figure and guess that could have been overtaken by Bournemouth or Brentford

That’s kind of where it’s a bit mad tbh. We could probably shift 60/65k ST’s no bother. However, I’m not convinced we’d sell that out every single game once we’re established in European competitions* *assuming we expanded and kept ST sales at like 45k

You have to factor in that if (when) we reach a stage where we’re regularly competing in the Champions League, there’ll be times when bog standard league games just don’t have the same appeal as they do right now. Playing at home to Crystal Palace at 2pm on a Sunday after you’ve just played Real Madrid on the Wednesday night, simply won’t have the same vibe/energy as near enough every league game does now. Could we fill 60/65k for some games? Absolutely. Would we always fill it regardless of opposition/circumstances? I’m not so sure. If you’re lucky enough to be able to attend all/most games at SJP at the moment, then savour it, because it’s a pretty unique situation at the moment, and it won’t always be like this.

Van de Beek still alive?

Possibly why he didn’t play against Fulham. Said he’d trained the day before so, physically at least, he could have played some part. Howe possibly realised he’s one of those players that needs to feel bang on to be effective. Hopefully after a solid week of training he’s at that point now.

Yeah, I agree that is becoming an issue, particularly with regard to how youngsters are supposed to get on the ladder. I don’t blame them for not implementing it straight away post-takeover though. I think reviewing it after a full season of being ‘good’ again would be sensible

It’s not quite every game that requires loads of points, Brighton and Wolves went down to 15 this season, but equally, it’s highly unlikely Southampton (or any other game) will drop to Members sale.

BBC and Sky had that figure on there match reports. Someone must have made a mistake somewhere.

That attendance figure has to be wrong. According to this article they sold nearly 30k ST. Even if they don’t count those that didn’t turn up (I thought they did?), there’s absolutely no way over half of them didn’t bother to turn out. Odd. Edit: Twitter says it was 35k, which would seem more likely

13,900 seems a bizarrely low attendance for a league game. Obviously various contributing factors but I assumed they actually had more ST holders than that figure?

If he went to Forest, I’d give him a reasonable chance of keeping them up. They’ve signed some decent enough players. Would obviously take him a while to get his methods working, and might well be too late by then, but he could definitely make them hard to beat, and they’ve got some reasonable attacking players, so you never know. Having said that, sacking Cooper already would be fairly shite given what he’s done for them, but that’s the way it seems to go now.

His lack of self-awareness when doing interviews like that is truly astonishing

If that’s true the manager is an idiot. I know he’s an important player for them, but he’s not good enough to playing when he’s not fit enough to be taking part in warm ups. Anyway, again, Sven Botman….

Apparently. And gave up as soon as it went 0-2. He’s a coward. We saw that with numerous instances when he was here (granted he was very young). The worst being the feinted ‘headbutt’ incident when he squared up to Gary Cahill at SJP Anyway, Sven Botman’s great and he’lll only get better.

Referring to Mitrovic, who is, IMO, the biggest coward in the PL Edit: reading back, original post was ridiculously badly written (blame the ludicrous London traffic that has had me on a bus for the best part of 13 hours today…)