Shambles ! The Off Field Fiasco. UPDATE
By Neil Ravenscroft
September 11 2002
Roy Whalley has made a statement regarding the Tuesday night fiasco, but has he missed the point? Or indeed answered the questions?
UPDATE
Roy
Whalley has responded to the ticketing fiasco on Tuesday on the Official Site is
Unfortunately,
it doesn’t answer most of the criticisms made and sounds a bit like “we have
received the reports of your hole in the ground and are looking into it”.
11/09/2002 12:45 - Original Story.
And I’m not talking about what happened on the pitch – more of that later. So far this season, we have struggled to fill the ground and, after last night, we might have even more problems in the future
I got to the ground late (thanks to a friend who was running behind
time), only to find a queue for tickets that was about 100 yards long.
The club only had three windows open at the time and a fourth was only
finally opened up five minutes before kick off.
The outcome of this was that I got in about three minutes after kick off,
with a lot of fans still waiting at the ticket office.
The fact that so many came in late also meant that the atmosphere was
non-existent and Shrewsbury must have thought they were playing at home!
Someone
I know asked Roy Whalley what he could do about this and got the answer
“you’ve had a week to buy tickets for the game” –
not much sympathy there.
I
have to take issue on this statement, as most of the publicity about the tickets
had been about the deal of buying the package for
this game and the next two league games, something which us season ticket
holders would not take much notice of. It
was a nice, warm evening, the opposition was local, it was a cup game and yet
the club didn’t consider that a lot of people might decide to go on the spur
of the moment!
I
might have more sympathy for Roy Whalley’s point if we were selling out every
week and fans had got into the mentality of having to have a season ticket or
buy in advance, but this is not, nor has ever, been the case.
This
club boasts that it is taking a more professional
attitude than ever, but there was precious little evidence of that last
night, as forethought and forward planning were completely absent.
This doesn’t bode well for our attempts to get
more fans into the ground.
As
for the game, I seemed to be in a minority, in that my attitude afterwards was
“job done”. It wasn’t pretty,
it wasn’t very entertaining, but it was terribly
efficient. One goal, hit the
woodwork twice, two cleared off the line, the keeper producing a near miraculous
save from Zdrilic and Walker having only one save to make, all without playing
well (or even getting out of second gear).
Carbon (especially) and Hay looked good, Roper only troubled by Roger’s
pace (until he “did” him), Bazeley and Aranalde looked more comfortable at
wing back than full back, Sonner and O’Connor in complete
control of the midfield. Pity
Corica seemed out of sorts (his injury?) and the strikers just not clinical
enough. Even then, I though both the Leitao/Junior and Leitao/Zdrilic
partnerships showed some promise.
High
spot of the night? The disagreement
between Sonner and Junior when the Brazilian wanted
to have a go at goal from that free kick 35 yards out and the look on his face
when he lost the argument!