Match Day Thread versus Portsmouth

Complaints about seats.... to be addressed in the closed season... I think.

 

We are in the third division hp not the premiership. We have not historically needed 25000 which a load of people were baying for previous to the rebuild. We would not fill it if we had it. There could have been room for about another 1000 last night but it was pretty full. I doubt we would have sold that many extra so the numbers are about right. I have heard all of the cackle about lack of ambition etc before now but what we have is about what we need. To have more would be another expense for little or no return. Have to say I'm happy and relaxed with the running of the club and the ambition isn't lacking.

 

I saw a figure from another club for the complete rebuild of a similar grandstand, inclusive it's true I think of an hotel & shops... but then hung for a sheep not a lamb... £25m.

They couldn't afford that either.

 

You know it is possible that we could be playing Everton next season.
My point is...16000 in the stands would be fine..

 

The current support for the club is probably the best I have known it for a long time. It has been brought on gradually and now the numbers are consistent. The days of the fickle fan seem to have been put to bed and about time too. IF we get into the Championship then maybe there will be gates of 15/16000 every home game but I cannot see more than that. The support we get in this league is probably the envy of a whole load of others. Portsmouth, Ipswich and Sunderland for example have all got premiership history and have managed to keep a load of their support which is not that unusual. We haven't got that background so can't expect to compete with those sorts of numbers. However, if you look past the more famous of the bunch we are right up there with the best of the rest and way over what the so called smaller clubs can command.

 

In my day we packed in 30000 all standing except the grand stand which had seats..
I remember my Dad lifting me over the fence at the Barn Park end..watching Wilf Carter score his goals.

 

I also remember vast crowds but those days have long gone. The game in general then had clubs with huge followings compared with now. It was a cheap afternoon out for the working man in the days when most worked on a Saturday morning. However, we went through a patch in the 90's when gates dropped to 4000 or so and stuck on that for a long period. It wasn't until we got to the Championship again, we had a long association with the old league 2 so it wasn't new to the club, and once there we got double figure gates. We didn't maintain them though and that helped to bankrupt the club where we were paying more than we took in. That near demise stirred enough people to start the current rise of supporters who pay to watch. We gain a few more here and there and somehow keep them now whereas previously they would have taken any glory then melted away again.

 

Don't forget that at one-time there was a much larger naval contingent in the city. That was a pool of mostly young males with time on their hands.

 

If (IF) we were to be promoted I guess it's somewhat earlier than expected, in financial terms at least.

Covid denied the club substantial gate receipts and made the hospitality facilities stand idle for a period immediately after they'd been bought & paid for. Simon Hallett put £5m to keep it going which might otherwise bridged the gap up to the Championship.

Given the professional way the club is run, I'm sure by now there's a back-up plan but circumstances haven't been ideal off the pitch.

No doubt ticket prices would go up in a higher league and TV revenue would increase. The next stages in ground development would be to get the grandstand up to full capacity, which I presume isn't prohibitively expensive and then when 16k clearly isn't enough, fill in the vacant corners. Is that an extra 3k?

Beyond that, if a new grandstand is really c £20m, then I think we're definitely in that territory which Simon Hallett has already said is too much for him alone, especially as it would have to be supported by investment in players to make sure we stayed in leagues that filled a ground that size.

We've probably got players who could make the step-up but there would have to be additions. One thing's for sure, this administration isn't going to bet the farm by splashing out on big name players who haven't quite lived up to unearned reputations. Instead, we'll continue to use the analytics and try to find players who fit the style and with unrealised potential to make us automatic promotion candidates even if we can't stay up at the first attempt.

Would that keep fans happy? Do they really believe in the Hallett method or would they be calling for us to bid for Marcus Rashford and not turning up unless we did? Your guess is as good as mine.

 

I tried to explain this to somebody just the other day in the context of where the title "dockyard derby" came from. Back in the fifties and sixties there were indeed a load of Naval personnel around the City at weekends. In those days ratings were divided into 3 categories. Chatham ratings, Portsmouth ratings and Devonport ratings. It was the main ports the person was connected to geographically from origin. The other part of it was they were very poorly paid and loads could not afford to travel home every weekend and left a good few with nothing much else to do. So, they went out and had a few pints on a Saturday lunchtime when the pubs closed at 2.30pm. Just in time for kick off at the local football ground so why not spend the rest of the afternoon there. The number of punch ups there were between the various port ratings was legendary then. Hence the other title "Battle of the Ports". What it did do though was vastly inflate the crowd numbers. They weren't necessarily Argyle supporters just people at a loose end. 25000+ was average.

 

Yeah that was my point. I can remember as a child going to Navy Days when the number of ships available to go on display at just one of the various naval ports was probably equivalent to the entire Navy now. There'd sometimes be a carrier, a submarine, probably still a cruiser then, several frigates & destroyers of various types, fleet auxiliaries .. you couldn't get round them all. My favourite were the fast patrol boats that hurtled up and down the river...



Once a child, always a child in my case.

I'm not suggesting the Navy had nothing else to do but it was a big pool of lads of whom some must have turned up at Home Park...

 

Maybe we might see an increase in military personnel in the future.....If there is anything Putin has taught us is that bully boys will try it on when the opposition look weak and inadequate....we need to beef up are Navy, Army and Air Force.....Germany have thrown away there concerns about their Hitler past......in another era Germany arming themselves to the hilt as very worrying....the least we can do is beef things up....there are third world powers with bigger military clout than us.

Putin has woken the west up and got the opposite result then he expected.