stevegrant

Not quite sure what happened with the Notts bowling this morning, but the last few overs were pretty wild. 21 runs off a single over, and the winning runs scored off an absolute pie fired down the leg side and flicked to the very-fine-leg boundary.

Also needed proof they were one of the 9 million on Southsea Common

Dubai Saints usually meet in the bar at Arabian Ranches Golf Club. Drop Smithy a message on Twitter or Instagram

They're all postal, no option for electronic tickets. Theoretically I guess it reduces the likelihood of them ending up in the hands of touts, but when you're selling tickets less than a week before the game it does make it all a little bit tight. Also a nightmare for anyone travelling from overseas, I've had to act as courier for some mates travelling in because there's basically no chance the tickets would get there in time.

Problem is that no football club is developing their own in-house system because it would cost an absolute fortune, and there are quite a few largely off-the-shelf options out there. Ticketmaster, eTicketing (same firm, obviously ), SeeTickets, etc all offer their own platforms, plus firms like Kaizen and the one we currently use, Secutix offering what is effectively a SaaS package. It's quite flexible, but still has its limitations because features that you might think would be useful simply haven't been developed yet, and if a club requests something then they'll be the ones who would be on the hook to pay for it as a "customisation". Of course the company can then sell that feature to other customers once that one customer has paid for the development work...

I think you need to select the ticket type (adult, kids, OAP, etc) on the very first screen, when you've selected the seat on the seating plan. Don't think it offers the option to then change it on subsequent screens, even if you assign the ticket to a concession-eligible customer.

This is a REALLY annoying "feature" of the current online ticket system. For the more recent away games where he's got fewer aways on record than I have and it's mattered for getting priority, I'd want to secure mine and then get his as and when he's eligible, but rather than being able to do it through my own account and allocate the ticket to him, the only way I can do it is by logging in via his account

This aged well

In fairness, Abbott still took 44 wickets last year, and Abbas 53, so I don't think retaining them was necessarily the wrong move. Abbas' figures today were fine, comfortably the most economical as you'd probably expect. I think the main issue is the backup - Holland and Fuller are fine in certain conditions, but they do also tend to go for a lot of runs when they're not able to dominate, and it's such an old bowling attack overall. If someone like John Turner or even Brad Wheal were getting regular games then I don't think it would feel quite so bad.

Is the wicket just flat as a pancake or are we bowling a load of pies? Pretty much been a boundary an over all day!

There was still a fair bit of debate, the Archers was a bit of a split in the end with a fair number picking the back of the Chapel for the first season but then most of them moved to the Northam after that when it became clear they were very much in the minority. It wasn't anywhere near as straightforward as you make out. It worked itself out after a year or two, but without anything physical to work with at the time (remember that 3D model that everyone got shown as an approximation of what your view would be like? ) and relatively few of the fanbase using forums, communication and organisation was difficult.

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