Thinking about PT’s post, I said some weeks back that Bescot was oddly both too small and too big.
For twenty years or more we have been a club in decline, with a Chairman going through the motions, doing just enough to keep at least 3,000 punters going: enough to pay the rent and declare a profit of several thousand pounds. Any bigger, Bescot would have been a mausoleum.
But the potential here is far bigger than that. I seem to recall when Bescot was being planned, there was talk of a capacity of 16,000, but that never materialised. With seating, other regulations and segregation it is now barely 10,000 in, lets face it, a dated and uncomfortable stadium.
You might say that in the Championship, we never achieved the gates that the size of the town should be generating, but this is where Bescot was too small. In the Champ (or Division 1 as it was) we faced the same sort of problem as we have with Leicester, big teams gobbled up extra seats and under Roy Walley’s stewardship, the club never made it easy for fans to roll up on the day. Then of course the slippery slide took place and many of us got out of the habit of turning up week in week out.
The speed with which Leicester sold out and the remarkable, disproportionate volume of travelling Saddlers, should tell the club that given a feel good factor and success on the pitch, there is a well of untapped support, like there is at, err, ‘Bournemouth, Luton or Rotherham’!
Perhaps the vision of 12,000 - 16,000 needs to be realised