stevegrant

Except Saints won't, because Man United, Man City, etc will bribe players (and, probably more importantly, their parents) into joining them, which we won't be able to afford to do. It's all well and good having a reputable academy, but that's been based on having the pick of a fairly large geographical area. That won't be the case anymore because the bigger clubs will now be able to scout in those areas as well.

As far as I'm aware, the money isn't distributed evenly, it's all put into a central pool and is given as a grant on a case-by-case basis. Some clubs don't apply for any, some apply for much more than the £120k stated - obviously each one has to justify the spending.

While the new Academy proposals would appear to be an advantage to us, as we've already got most (if not all) of the infrastructure and funding in place, one of the reasons we are in such a strong position right now is that there is very little competition locally. The 90-minute rule means that the likes of Man United, Liverpool, etc can't touch the talent that's in our area. There's a slight overlap with Chelsea, but their academy has produced only one player who's even close to the current first team in the last decade or so (Josh McEachren). As long as the 90-minute radius rule applies, we have a massive competitive advantage. As soon as that rule disappears, we'll have Man United, Man City, Liverpool, Arsenal, etc encroaching on our "turf", and they can (and will) offer incentives far greater than we would be willing to, and they'd be able to poach players directly out of the academy once it became clear that particular player was likely to be a special talent, and they'd be able to do so for absolute peanuts, as the tribunal system would be scrapped with fixed fees payable depending on the age of the player.

It's the Alan "we don't really know much about Hatem Ben Arfa" Shearer disease

Is it the current West Ham player who bottled it at St Mary's for the second season running?

Bizarrely, with the usual 2100 allocation down there, I'd have agreed with you, as a lot of people simply can't be arsed with a ballot. However, with 3200, those who would have been thinking about going but weren't sure about the ballot will have been persuaded by the 50% increase in the likelihood of getting a ticket.

Confirmed on the Pompey OS that they've given us 3200 tickets for the game at Fratton, can only assume they're not confident of selling the tickets to home fans

And the originally-announced figure wouldn't have been a record, which they'd also announced at the time. Nothing suspicious there then...

Some interesting similarities there, Bristol City with a crap start and massive negative goal difference (but improved in the second half of the season when Nicky Maynard returned from injury), Derby starting strongly (faded badly), all three promoted sides in the top half.

Definitely announced in the ground as 32,150, but the BBC and other sites that use the Press Association/DataCo match data now say 32,152.

They presumably stopped routinely announcing it as they got embarrassed by the 13k figures we were getting at one stage.

Doesn't help that Middlesbrough is in one of the poorest areas of the country, hardest-hit by the recession. Their away numbers are quite impressive, though.

442, apparently.

Suspect Liverpool v Norwich on ESPN will be slightly more popular, unfortunately.

Don't forget that the segregation netting takes up a few hundred seats, 40 rows x 9 or 10 seats wide isn't far short of those "missing" 500.

When you call the ticket booking line, it'll initially try to route your call to the ticket office at SMS, but if there are no lines available (on an average weekday, I'd guess there's no more than 2 or 3 members of staff), it then gets transferred to the call centre.

Point of order, we lost 3-0 in that game. Watford only had 3 shots all afternoon

I genuinely don't think they're actually that bothered. The information is important to us, but as far as they're concerned, as long as they sell the tickets, they're not fussed.

Well, let's face it, the old one will have been worn out a long time ago

See above... direct for less than £150

I did look at that yesterday as my old man hasn't got any aways on his season ticket, but the general sale process will only be open to those who have been on their database since last season. Their sales periods before that seem overly complex with members requiring 3, 2, 1 and then 0 home games this season, followed by non-members on the database with 3, 2, 1 and then 0 home games this season. I'm not convinced they'll be able to find enough skates who can understand that system to be able to sell out

Easyjet and Air Malta both fly to Valletta from Gatwick, return trip with either of them for the last weekend in November is around £150 at the moment (via expedia, but worth checking direct with each airline)

The online sales site only tracks purchases made by you. It doesn't show transactions where someone else has bought tickets using your customer number. If only it was as simple as that. A mate of mine checked a few weeks ago how many aways he had registered against his customer number this season and found out that neither Barnsley or Ipswich away had been recorded properly. Someone else had bought the tickets, and the other customer numbers had all had the tickets logged, but his had been missed off. IMO, it should be a relatively simple bit of functionality to add to the online ticket site to be able to check all transactions involving your customer number, regardless of whether you're the one who actually made the booking.

Bet they won't...

That's about a fiver less than I thought they'd charge us