stevegrant

And there we go It's all irrelevant until they actually confirm that someone will be buying the club and taking it out of administration. At this stage, I'll still be quite surprised if they manage to start the season.

It's a rather interesting coincidence that dozens of Conservative MPs own shares in G4S, isn't it?

It varies by club. While, for evacuation reasons, safety personnel will always know how many people are present in each stand, attendance figures are often published in terms of tickets sold rather than turnstile clicks.

I tried to get a ticket for Derby at short notice (about a day or two before the game) and was told by the ticket office that it was sold out. Any that weren't taken on the day would have been player comps.

Worth noting that their 4 big away attendances - at Birmingham, Brighton, Saints and West Ham - were all in the last two months of the season. 719 to Bristol City, 815 to Coventry and especially 943 to Watford is pathetic. The home attendances follow a similar pattern, they only got 20k+ 4 times before March, and every single one of them (Saints, Cardiff, Brighton, West Ham) was when the away team sold at least 2500 (us and West Ham had 4k+). Still, Reading being tinpot is nothing new...

And yet seemingly won't be penalised for their incompetence as they're set to be awarded loads of police and NHS contracts

Some of the comments below that article

3 months of enjoyment followed by an uncertain future or 3 months potential plodding followed by a permanent contract? Simple decision for me, but it's not me who has to make the decision.

No, one doesn't, because it's 99.999999999999% certain that it never happened. You could drive a aircraft carrier through the holes in his story.

London games were always likely to be a problem for non-ST holders this season. I reckon you'll get a ticket for Wigan (up to 5000 if we want them), Swansea and probably Newcastle and Sunderland on general sale though.

Yeah, sorry about that. The sole reason for me moving up here was to end that sodding commute. Two hours door-to-door, made worse because the fast trains don't stop at Clapham Junction, so I'd have to go into Waterloo and back out again on the stopper, change at Clapham Junction for Wandsworth Common. Leave home just before 7 in the morning, get back at 7.30 in the evening. Living in Croydon, I can get to work in about 20 minutes now, hence the staying in bed until 8am thing I can pretty much guarantee you'll want to find a place up here if your contract gets extended.

Indeed. It can be very lucrative

What a díck The ridiculous thing is that there's absolutely no way of proving that it happened at any stage, but clearly it's a good story so he'll make a few bob off the back of it, while the club is left to take the flak.

Leaving at 4am, returning at 2am?

Fair to say he's not alone with that particular sentiment

What problems are you encountering?

So the new (presumably expensive) ticketing system is no better than the last one then...

I reckon it's a fair bit more than that. Bear in mind we went into admin in 2009, having been playing at St Mary's since 2001, so that's 8 years of mortgage payments (I think it was a bit more than £1.5m pa, but will go with that as it's an easy number to multiply ) plus £11-12m for the 2009 settlement (Barclays got **** all in comparison) plus this latest £4m. By my reckoning, that's at least £27m repaid to them. The total loan amount was £25m, IIRC. £5m of the build cost was funded by the sale of The Dell to Barratt Homes and another £2-3m from the share issue that the guy from Sanderson whose name escapes me was the main underwriter. When you include the interest we would have paid over the 25 years of the mortgage, they've lost out, but in real terms they probably still made an overall profit.

Interesting...

Difficult to tell because stadium design has evolved a lot in the decade or so since St Mary's was built, new stadia these days tend to have a lot more curves and intricacies than the fairly standard Barr-built design we and a number of other similar-sized clubs have got. As a guide, Brighton's half-finished effort cost in the region of £90m (although knock a few million off for the public inquiry that dragged on for years - we wouldn't have needed one if we were building that stadium where St Mary's is), plus however much they're spending on the extra seats this summer. Given the old design would have cost roughly three times as much to extend as it did to build in the first place on a per-seat basis, it seems reasonable to assume that extending St Mary's with a more modern design on the extension would cost a lot more.

Double-edged sword really, on one hand they surely won't be as lucky as they were at times last season with teams missing 10-15 clear chances per game against them, but on the other hand their own clinical finishing will come in handy.

No doubt now all their plastics have come out of the woodwork again, we'll only get about 2000 tickets up there, when halfway through last season they couldn't wait to give teams 4000+

And presumably it's still an absolute ****hole

SWT do offer discounted advance fares, but not on trains between key stations. Southampton Central and Southampton Airport are both among their key stations on the Waterloo to Weymouth line. It means it can often be cheaper to buy an advance ticket from Waterloo to Brockenhurst than it is to buy an advance ticket from Waterloo to Southampton

Sort of. The integrity of the SPL clubs appears to be intact, as it's they who have voted against letting Rangers Newco into the league. However, the SPL themselves - in tandem with the SFA - are ****ting themselves because (somehow) the various commercial and broadcasting deals they have seem to stipulate that both of the Old Firm clubs need to be present, otherwise they have get-out clauses. As a result, Neil Doncaster (who you may remember was CEO at Norwich when they were financially in the **** at the same time as we went into admin - he also had a place on the FL board - and was key in getting the FL to ignore their own rules and deduct us 10 points) is trying to get them into Division One rather than starting right at the bottom. He's claiming it "would be unfair on the 41 innocent clubs" for Rangers to be put in Division 3, presumably because the clubs will lose out financially as a result of these contracts being cancelled. However, you'd like to think each of them had actually thought this through when they voted against Rangers keeping their place in the SPL in the first place...