stevegrant

Tickets in the very central blocks of the Itchen and Kingsland for the Stoke game are (somehow) £50! I get the idea, and I like that rather than spending years on studies and focus groups, the club seem to be happy to just get shit done for once. Ultimately if it doesn't work out, they can hold their hands up and say "sorry, we thought it was a good idea, it didn't work, we can roll it back for next season". I think there are some concerns - not least the pricing for other areas of the ground (as yet unspecified but definitely rising) and the undoubted hassle of thousands of people moving seats for one reason or another - but people have been crying out for the club to do something about the away end and finally they've done it and yet people are still fucking moaning, they can't win. What appears to be a big focus - and this isn't isolated to us at all - is increasing the amount of time fans want to be at or around the ground. Rather than turn up at 2:55 and leave on the final whistle (or, as seemingly in the case of a LOT of people these days, 85 minutes), they are looking to create things that make fans want to get to the ground at lunchtime and stick around after the game for an hour or two. I think the latter will always be largely result-driven and they'll never ever be able to get away from that, but if they're able to put some decent entertainment on, with a variety of actually nice food options and a non-shit beer selection, maybe it'll work. It's not going to be everyone's cup of tea, certainly, but we'll see how it goes.

I don't know any Saints fan that gives a solitary shit about Jurgen Klopp.

Genuinely cannot believe we're going to sell 5500 tickets for a Wednesday night game at Anfield when we've got about a billion games to play this month

You'd think so but no, basic arithmetic says otherwise. It's an average over the 8 games so any game average less than you already had will reduce the total average. Look at it this way. For 7 something or others you have an average of 10, in the 8th something or other you only have an average of 5, so the new total average is 70+5/8 =9.375 so your average has gone down. Today's match was close so our relative run rate would have been much lower than the 1,1 or so that we had beforehand. I did a bit of approximative fag packet calculation and we'd have needed to knock off the 326 runs in about 37 overs, scoring rate a bit less than 9 an over. So a good T20 rate really. Also, to clarify, this is simply net run rate, nothing to do with the Duckworth/Lewis method of calculating revised targets when the game is disrupted.

https://www.efl.com/how-to-watch/broadcast-partners/ - this is the list of overseas broadcast partners, so shows a list of countries who DO have deals with the EFL. This means that any game that is televised by Sky in the UK can also be televised by any of these broadcasters, PLUS one of the Saturday 3pm games. So it's quite likely that unless you were in a country that doesn't have a broadcast deal with the EFL, there's a lot of games that won't be available on Saints Play.

Stelios Giannakopoulous was pretty good for Bolton back in the day, tbf

No doubt we've been a massive success in T20, which is ultimately what brings the cash into the county, but there shouldn't be a need to prioritise one over the other.

There is a salary cap across the entire county game, and it's the same number for every county. Surrey seem to have a squad of about 50 players with huge depth, especially among the bowlers, and yet our depth is more or less non-existent - to the extent that the current first-choice openers wouldn't be 5th choice at the Oval, even with Rory Burns averaging about 10 this season - so if we have a much smaller group of players then that should mean that we can afford to pay the bigger salaries for the better players. Unless of course we've already committed big money to the mediocre players that are already there. We've completely wasted this season and last with the best bowling attack we've had in my lifetime because we don't have enough quality batsmen. It's pretty incredible that we came as close as we did last year when we were pissing around with an opening pair from Weatherley, Organ and Holland. Middleton looks like he has something about him, but he's a kid who we shouldn't have to solely rely on.

Proven a very costly drop, too. Aldridge was on 8 at the time, and went on to make 88. Vince has also just dropped a tougher chance from Rew at slip off Dawson, just before he got to his century. Frustrating, as there seems to be very little in the pitch after that early burst from Abbott yesterday morning, so we need to be taking the limited chances that come our way. Their bowling attack is much depleted in this game, they've rested Gregory, Overton, Davey and Henry ahead of Finals Day, plus keeper Kohler-Cadmore, so against a second-string attack our top order have really got to capitalise.