stevegrant

Got to be a way of segregating down Melbourne Street - can imagine there's a lot of people in the Kingsland who would go that way, and blocking it off will only increase the pressure on the bridge in the Northam/Kingsland corner. Put the coaches in the crescent bit of Melbourne Street, allowing home fans in the Kingsland to still use the main road to exit the area, and home fans from the Itchen/Chapel can use Marina Parade if they are travelling in that direction.

Any coaches going to Southampton Central could probably be switched to Britannia Road where the away coaches currently park, but I'd imagine it makes sense for the ferry ones to remain at the Chapel end, there are coach parking spots on Chapel Road that make it quick and easy to get away and in the right direction.

It was too many matches back in a time when the broadcast contracts weren't anywhere near as lucrative as they are now. Man City earned around €130m from the Champions League alone last season, effectively €10m per game played in the competition. Meanwhile, as PL champions, they get about £180m as a result of 38 games' work. And next season there are more games, because UEFA has realised that more games now equals more money - 8 group stage games in a weird single group table where each team plays two games against teams in each of the 4 pots, but not the same teams. There is also an extra knockout round for those who finish 9th to 24th in the 36-team group stage, so it is these potential extra four games that have led to the Premier League bribing the FA Cup competition committee into removing replays. Solely at the behest of up to 8 PL clubs, only one of whom have had to play multiple FA Cup replays in the last decade.

Per the club's FAQs (linked above), the segregation will be in block 28.

Everyone has their own way of supporting the team, probably a fair chance there's plenty of our travelling support who would have a similar opinion of you. There will be some safe standing in the away end. Don't think it'll be the whole away section though.

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.