Just had a quick look on the e-ticketing site. Probably 150 left in the lower, similar in the middle, quite a few in the upper. As always the family stand is sparse. Depending on how many turn up on the day, I’d say it’ll probably be 6,500 tops
Such a shame this is a night game at an expensive time for people, but get a good result today and New Years Day could be decent too.
So basically 5k home fans, that would be disappointing.
Roger the Butler
Yes, the best games for me were always under the lights. The sense of theatre and, although I have never smoked, the faint smell of cigarette smoke. It’s funny how, at Fellows Park, the night matches were the best attended and, for me, the best remembered, but, at Bescot, we get lower attendances.
I think my favourite night match of all was the 4-3 win over Bristol Rovers when we were losing at the end of 90 minutes. Injury time went on forever. And there was a bomb scare before the game - the announcer asked the supporters in the stand to look under their seats.
Yeah, hope for a lot more but I understand the potential reasoning. Ideal scenario would be this fixture, with all the associated stuff around it, on a Saturday that so happens to be one of those schools promotions. Should still be a good atmosphere though.
Train strikes will put a good number off.
Problem is you can watch the game from the comfort of your sofa via ifollow legal and illegal streams on the cheap. Add to that the pandemic, cost of living & travel strikes. Trying to grow a fan base especially with 4 big teams on your door step offering better football and big games for roughly the same price is like p1ssing in the wind.
Really? That was the solution. Not evacuate immediately?
I disagree. I think there are 20k on the Villa season ticket waiting list and 10k on the wolves waiting list.
Obviously not all of these will want to watch Walsall, but my point is demand for good football is there.
We could easily attract a few 000s of these to support Walsall (and some of these probably live in Walsall) if they were offered a good match day experience.
I think Trivela are aware of this.
This was the 60’s.There would have been men in that stand that had been through a world war and a bomb going off in his face wouldn’t have been no more than a flesh wound to them.
10989, I think, but it’s impossible to find out for sure.
I don’t think it’s too bad especially for midweek.
Go back even 5 years and it was about 3.5k home fans for mid table league 1 fare so some lapsed fans have returned in recent times it seems.
There is plenty of potential in next six months so let’s hope club have switched on as fans will always be attracted by winning football at home.
End season with 7-8k attendances, get promoted and you can continue with that attendance range in league one for probably first time since mid 2000s especially given some of the away followings in that league now.
There are a couple sold now. Must be reading UTS.
I’m at a loss as to why we didn’t just release the whole 1800 for them for that end from the get go.
Not sure if this is the case, but if the away team sell the tickets, we give them a percentage of the sales, to cover their costs. If we sell them on the day, we keep 100% of the ticket sales.
Small fry probably, but look after the pennies…
Whatever happens tonight, I hope our directors are pushing them for more cup tickets to be released in their side stand.
A few points on this.
Firstly, have Villa really got 20k on the waiting list? I keep hearing it but I’m not sure I believe it. Where on earth have they come from? Did something happen that I have completely missed? Because they haven’t averaged 40,000 since 2007/2008. Fair enough they are averaging over 40k this season but 20k waiting list seems a lot out of thin air.
I’m not sure how many fans change their club and go and follow another. It does happen, I know a few. My wife for one who was an Albion fan but actually fell in love with following Walsall after a few away days with me. I do know a couple of Villa fans who for different reasons started following Walsall. I guess it is worth targeting any fans that will come to our games. It’s pricey unless you have a season ticket which is one of the reasons why we don’t get so many floating fans as years ago.
I-Follow. I have never been a fan. I have said it on here before and it wasn’t a popular opinion. I get that it did a good job during the pandemic keeping fans being able to see their team. I also get that it is great for overseas fans. From what I see it is way too easy to access it even if it isn’t available in the UK for a specific game. It also seems that the restrictions on viewing in the UK for what they are worth are there to protect the Premier League. I have used it on occasion so that could make me a bit of a hypocrite I suppose. I’m still not a fan but it seems kind of inevitable football will move more and more in that direction as the years go by.
A lot of points there not all attached to your post Andy. Just some thoughts of mine.
It was 1973, but as you imply, a very different time. Have a quick look around, and then On With The Match.
Don’t the away club ask for however many tickets they think they will sell in the first instance (up to capacity)?
I think they do yes. I think they get an admin fee for all the tickets they request - so there’s definitely a (relatively small) incentive to under order. Which is what County have possibly done here.
But both clubs should have been alerted by how quickly that thousand went and moved to avoid all this a couple of weeks ago. Yes, there are postal strikes but we could have met at Keele (about 40 minutes drive each) and handed over another 800 odd.
There’s a vested interest for both clubs in getting stuff like this right. County will want as big a travelling backing as they can get. We are responsible for health and safety so inviting 500 of them to queue with our fans isn’t great and then less importantly it is also missing revenue (up to £10k).
I just get frustrated when football clubs are thoughtless around how they treat fans and often ask fans to jump through the kind of hoops you’d never tolerate if it were a concert or theatre type event.
Hopefully the mildish weather means that those stood on the car park for a while this evening won’t give up and go home before getting to the front.
Surely in this day and age, tickets could be sent digitally and printed off at Stockport’s end.
Edit*
I mean when it became clear they needed more. Obviously too late for that now.
Maybe payback for them not giving us a sufficient allocation for the cup game?