Mattyblue

Last term was their highest average attendance since 1961. How did that randomly happen last season do you think?

How many other clubs on there have their ground c60% empty week to week? Supply and demand. A club with up to 27,000 home seats to play with should be much more creative than say a Millwall who only have c17,000 tickets in home areas or a Luton with about 9,000. In typical Swag/Suhail fashion it was the usual half arsed approach - they reduced them, but not by enough for anybody to particularly take notice, certainly when it comes to adult pricing. So the dial won’t move, but it will probably see us avoid a calamitous collapse and everyone will hit their targets. Bonuses all round 🎉

The ‘golden generation’ were individually quality players but just did not gel as a group, club cliques all over the place and/or mismanaged, I.e Scholes. One thing Southgate has excelled at is creating a ‘club like’ mentality.

Unbalanced due to the defence. But then again it’s not a vintage era for European sides, France aside.

Fiver a ticket from memory. Fulham fans out of sight in the corner of the DEnd Upper. Warm day, big win, Ewood looked a picture. An average crowd of 26,000 that season (pretty much what we had in 2009/10, just months later BRFC was sold) . The damage these people have done to this football club.

I’m the last one to defend the commercial operation of this club, but isn’t it just standard that away tickets go on sale with three weeks to go? So presumably back end of this week.

Capello was terrible, completely not cutout for international football. Has he done better than Sven? I’d say so. But in reality he’s managed to win a game more in tournaments than Sven managed. Like I said time will tell with what the next manager does with such a talented crop.

Time will tell on Southgate. Is getting to the business ends of tournament a sign of a good manager in itself when he has been blessed with a very strong set of players? If his replacement goes and wins the lot with them then he obviously was kept on far too long. However, if the new bloke does no better/worse than maybe he did have some qualities, certainly he has transformed the vibe in the camp and has created an environment players want to be in, which is very important at international level - the days of Liverpool/Man Utd cliques for example have long gone.

Darlo FC have long left it. A lower league rugby club uses it now with gates of a few hundred folk rattling around it.

Because he’s an FA blazer to his bones. You’d imagine the ‘ethics committee’ or whatever would give him a job for life if they could.

Plenty. Far more cash is thrown about for a start. He had a long contract. You don’t bundle him straight out the door to a middling club who is offering a pittance…but of course the disgraceful owners gave us no choice.

It’s not even a debate. It’s dead simple - it’s the only price he could’ve gone for with the seller being a distressed one. So I suppose it’s ‘value’ then.

Couldn’t care less who they play as long as they are a decent standard to help the players get back up the speed. Get fit, don’t get injured is all that matters. But it just amuses me that it’s the same 4/5 sides year after year after year. Though to be fair we can’t be letting the club secretary organise anything more complicated, they may end up playing Wigan Warriors by mistake.

Obviously a decade in the wilderness has meant a lot of folk on here have forgotten what a top player looks like.

What-ifs of course, but always wondered what Jack’s plan would’ve been if we had gone up in 1989. Would he still have bought the club in ‘91, or earlier? Or carried on with the bits and bobs of investment he made in the late 80s?

Wasn’t there those fans that went to clean Jack’s statue (after asking club permission) and Swag actually went and got security to move them on?

Exactly, and those lost thousands would worry the powers that be at a normal club far more than a couple of hundred folk at the back of a stand chanting about the CEO… here they couldn’t give a feck about the lost fans, but they didn’t half move quick at purging when Swag got an odd chant aimed at him.

Think you know where the friendlies are… Accy, Fleetwood, Wigan, Stockport. The ‘friendlies’ Rolodex is obviously as small as the ‘potential sponsor’ one.

So wait the owners *weren’t* serious when two years ago it was definitely a new dawn (with our sparkly new structure) this time. We had a ‘model’ that was definitely the way forward. ‘Sell on and invest’, ‘incremental improvement’, ‘Brentford’. And the usual Eeyore brfcs-ers who were a tad sceptical weren’t just being their tiresome glass totally empty selves… but might just have learnt something, over, you know, a decade.

Two and a half weeks before they hike them 80 quid. So there’s a long way to go to even get close to last season’s tally by then (as you ain’t selling many more post hike). So stop pissing about and extend the early bird to at least the end of the month, so covering a payday for most folk.

As a Blackburner I’m proud of him. The club themselves, hmmm, all comes across small time, like everything else these days - bit like when fellow feeder club Crewe presumably showed pride in a David Platt or Robbie Savage playing for their country.

I see this debate is still going round in circles. Seems pretty simple to me. Four months after leaving he is strolling around for England like a Rolls-Royce, so how possibly could a measly £18million objectively be a good price? But could this club, at that time, have got anymore? No, because they had pretty much stamped a ‘please buy him, we’re skint ‘on his forehead.

It is very sad, because the game is so cherished here, you can see that with the relatively huge crowds even clubs way down the non-league pyramid get in comparison to any other country. The top division has turned into a monster out of all proportion.

Despite a decade of utter shite for us as they hit the ‘heights’… we still live rent free in their collective heads. Always in our shadow.

He’ll never get near the England side with the likes of Mainoo arou… oh.