Sour Mash

I thought we were meant to have a brilliant academy and the skates were a joke and had a nearly non-existent youth set-up?

Can someone post up a link to the plans for the new development?

If I can be @rsed tomorrow morning I might drop our ticket office an e-mail on all this, cheeky c**ts.

See if this link works to the Watford ticket site http://mobile.watfordfc.com/runtime/watford/ticket-article?articleId=2488477

Its just another example in my eyes of the club not giving a f**k about making it easy for fans to buy tickets for away games. Absolutely bizarre.

I'm sure I'll get all the know it alls telling us otherwise, but this is certainly a really good example of where having a fans representative having access to communicate with the club would really work. We've got plenty of support living up north that this is going to affect. Ridiculous.

The back half/back third of blocks 1-3 stood for the West Ham game, so you should be alright in that regard.

Don't be ridiculous.

Best post on here and sums up my thoughts on the matter exactly.

Is that the one full of posters predicting they'd be 'toast' a year ago? Full of self congratulations and premature excitement about the end of the Skates? Think this could be a fairly shrewd, cheap, low-risk appointment by them.

Of course it doesn't and you don't need to justify yourself on here.

No-one knows. THis is Saints Web for f**s sake.

I always felt a bit sorry for Friends Provident - a good local company investing in Saints with good intentions of a long-term partnership and got a massive negative reaction for signing up to sponsor the ground. I can see it happening again, there is a lot of money to be made from it, but as others have alluded to it isn't as tempting as sponsoring new grounds, as everyone will always know it as St Marys. Same with St James' Park, so the geordies need to calm down with all their crying. What I don't get is what will happen to grounds like the "Amex" or "Emirates" when their sponsors finally change/end? I can only think of Huddersfield who have changed their ground sponsor, just can't see how it would work after 10 or 20 years of one particular name?

Exactly. Their first eleven isn't too bad at all, better than a fair few teams in this league, plus it'll be their cup final, every one of them will be massively up for it trying to prove a point, plus their crowd will get behind them and make it tough for our players. Certainly surprised how overly confident some of our fans are.

If it wasn't for the fact that this could have seriously detrimental repercussions for our economy, I would be cracking up at this. Having failed at taking over Europe via various wars, France and Germany have failed again after trying the economic route. The southern European countries are finally paying the price for their lazy, public sector heavy, inefficient way of life, I have little sympathy for any of them.

Good, I'm glad we're all agreed that an expansion of St Mary's is a reasonably realistic aim, but that none of us really have an undersanding of how any such decision may be made.

I like the EDL purely for being able to get reactions like this from some of the drips on here.

Exactly. Plenty of people jumping on the bandwagon. We've all got plenty of chances to wear poppies and show our respect without all this fuss.

Ha, you in block 11 mate? Try and move if/when they open blocks 1-3?

You contradict yourself there. So we don't know the commercial implications really and they're far more more detailed and complex than simply ticket price per seat. If that logic was used why did we move from the Dell? Why didn't we just charge £50 a game there? Why does any club move to a bigger stadium? Or any business increase its capacity rather than simply increase its prices? I'm not expecting us to do any development anytime soon, but there is potential for this club to grow and as with any business there is always the need for a certain amount of speculation and risk to achieve that growth.

Yes, we all get the logic, but in your previous post you appeared almost gushing at the thought we'd be raising prices as opposed to expanding the ground. Plus while I do agree that your argument does carry logic, it is still not as black and white as you paint it. A big ground means more people supporting Saints on a regular basis, buying shirts, merchandise, signing up to Saints Player or whatever else, it makes us a bigger club, raises the profile of the football club which could transfer itself into greater amounts earned through sponsorship, advertising, media coverage etc. Lots of positive intangibles, that are much harder to calculate than a simple P&L on each seat built/sold.

If it meant giving 5k to away fans I wouldn't want it. Plus we wouldn't need to do that. Any team that could bring 5k, we could sell 40k ourselves for I reckon.

While you and CB Fry are certainly correct, that the sensible business case is to simply increase prices as a result of increased demand, surely as fans we would prefer to say average 40k attendances in the Prem paying on average of £32 a ticket, then 32k paying an avergae of £40 a ticket?

Probably because the journalist completely made it up, entirely randomly and is purely a figment of his imagination

I was at WHL that night, think it was on a Monday for sky (?), cracking game. Have been told about the trip to Ayresome and 150 is probably generous. Through our time in the top flight we never took too many away at times, certainly M'Boro, Sunderland, Blackburn, Everton, Leeds I remember taking a couple of hundred to all of those at different times. Never got quite as low as those Cov figures and our away support has improved massively in the last 4-5 years.