Mattyblue

double

“But ‘oo we gonna get?”

Regular on brfcs, I reckon, so he knows the score - and we have had an influx of newbies recently…

You have to roll the dice from time to time. Fresh people, fresh ideas. A new voice is needed every now and then, especially in the modern game. He may crash and burn, but that’s football, you have to be ready to accept that, or else we may have just given TM a new ten year deal and left him to it.

Interesting amount of PR being done as well. Football Focus, NW Tonight, The Times. When was the last time we had anything like this amount of exposure? The build up to the FA Cup QF with Liverpool, maybe? Been a while that’s for sure.

A ‘journo’ with a gmail address…

Carrying on my HBO binge, watching ‘Big Love’, about Mormons in Utah who engage in polygamy. Obviously a drama so of course liberties will be being taken with the reality of their lifestyles, but still a great insight into a batshit world…

Can just see him knocking an ale back in De Lacy’s. I imagine Mogga would be skriking in his flat looking at old paintings of Ayresome Park.

It also perhaps shows the difference in structure. TM was running the whole place, very 80s/90s, but if that main man is someone of fairly average competency, then it’s a sense of Jack of all trades, master of none. The modern game now expects the Head Coach to be exactly that - someone to improve the performances of the first team squad and to find ways to win matches, the other stuff is looked after elsewhere…

Crowds can only go so high with just 8,500 ST holders as you need large numbers of match day buyers turning up every week to take up the slack to turn it into a decent gate - something you obviously don’t need to the same extent if you have 12/13k. But if on Sunday and onwards we can pull in 4/5k walk ons at £25 -£30 (so not exactly give away prices) then that’s a good base to build on. Last season we then supplemented that with good numbers of half STs… alas that will be a struggle this time however well we could end up doing when the energy bills start coming through the letterboxes…

Of course if you win it works, that’s the whole point. TM’s tinkering rarely did, as for me he didn’t have the tactical nous to pull it off - a prime example being wasting a year trying to play like Swansea are now (i.e without the players to do it) in the lockdown season No surprises that when he stumbled across a settled personnel and formation last season is when he got results.

In the present day, most Rovers fans I come across, hope, not even expect, that in a good season we will be ‘in the mix’ for the second tier play offs positions… something we spent the majority of the pre-Jack 1980s doing. Doesn’t seem a particularly ‘spoilt’ fanbase that has such an outlook, and it certainly shouldn't lend itself to barbs of ‘too high expectations’, ‘it’s not 1995 anymore’.

Home turnouts around what we had for QPR will do for me for now, as the opening game normally has bigger numbers of walk ons than the matches that follow. So if we stay around that figure it certainly shows a spike in interest… but just imagine what kind of crowds we could be seeing if we’d not priced STs at £429-£529 for any potential new purchaser.

They are still down the side for league matches. Just don’t think they bother opening that shed stand for cup games.

£6/7 the monthly magazine, wasn’t it? What another daft initiative that was. I imagine most copies were given away in the lounges.

Produced for a crowd of just a 1,000 people… don’t they know that ‘there’s no profit’ in programmes? Imagine just wanting to provide a full match day experience for your fans.

But they have added a few thousand members this season. Had 17,000 on last week, miles up. It doesn’t seem to be taking off anywhere else, but an interesting experiment all the same…

https://www.wearehullcity.co.uk/tickets/memberships/

Obvious quality, yet spends season after season loaned out without a chance of getting a game for his parent club. Everything that’s wrong with the ‘Big 6’s’ stranglehold on the modern game from academies onwards.

You honestly think a single fan thought we were about to sign Ronaldinho?

"How it descended into that, I don't know. What they've done is left us open to criticism on mentality.” What a plonker he is 😀

Hull offer it, no?

You’ve convinced me, so that’s my gas bill sorted.

Just the nine Championship clubs knocked out by lower league opposition tonight… so definitely nothing risky about putting a Merce on that near certainty tomorrow.

If it was a late season dead rubber and the young loaned player was about to go back to his parent club, of course play your own youngsters over the loanee. But at this stage if Morton is expected to be around the first team, then this is exactly the kind of game he should be playing in to get his match fitness up.