Cod Almighty | Diary

It's festive, it's football, it's not a TV show!

6 December 2022

Trentside Diary writes: Town's own Glastonbury / Peter Kay / Play-off semi-final tickets went on sale yesterday. Do I mean Mansfield away on 17 December? Yes, I do. Should it have felt this stressful for a game against our fourth tier, not far away but not terribly notable rivals? No, it shouldn't.

We do like to get tickets for away games at Nottinghamshire clubs if we can, when we can save a few miles and minutes in the car. If we don't get them, it's no biggee as they say. We'll just listen to John Tondeur's dulcet tones. We could even watch this one apparently as we’re still in that period of Football League bountifulness when they are generously allowing us to watch from the warmth of our beds or sofas at 3pm on a Saturday. More on that later.

Back to the start. The reason buying Mansfield tickets had a slight stress about it was we had decided to have a family Christmas get together over that weekend taking in the game and the Panthers the next day. To do that, we had to make sure we all got tickets. We have them linked but oh, the stress of making sure I was online and ready to go at 7 o’clock in the morning. It was just like getting Springsteen tickets or any other gig at the moment. "You have entered a queue and have five minutes before you will enter the site". There are obviously a lot of us who are planning festive build-up football. I was sitting in the dark, trying not to move so I wouldn't wake up the dogs, watching that clock tick down. It's an eternity isn't it? And then I got to zero and it didn't redirect. Horror of horrors. What do I do? I took a deep breath and clicked "back" and it went into the ticket site and we were sorted. Phew! Mum/Nan hadn't ruined Christmas before it had even started.

The chair of Accrington Stanley tweeted after their last home game against Oxford United. The responses make for an interesting read. He's not against streaming but is unhappy at the distribution of income from it, I think! The U’s average away attendance is 1055: the game was streamed and the away attendance was 340. Could the streaming and attendance be linked? I know it’s not scientific in any way but I can't help but think so, up to a point. It’s tough times for many and if you can pay £10 and sit with your mates and a few beers, it would be very tempting for many. Add in the difficulties of reliable trains, cost of travel and you start to think that the world is against football fans. There are many of us who would still rather go and watch the game. It's in our blood, but ultimately I'm sure streaming would have an impact on attendances and income to clubs.

Talking about the world conspiring against football fans, the FA Cup game against Burton Albion on 7 January has been moved to 5:30pm. That's probably okay for locals but less so for a decent away crowd and exiles. An argument in favour of streaming? I'll leave you to think about that one.

UTM!