Nonetheless, there are several that will bring many more than 500, and there will be greater home attendances for fixtures like Torquay, Pompey, etc. plus any other team that may be pushing for promotion towards the end of the season. We will still do well to top 4000 average for the season, but I suspect it will be just shy rather than down towards the 3550 you've picked from out of the Xmas shopping.
I did not say that those three combined were going to be similar to our overall season average however whatever way you want to dress it up game by game our attendance has been dropping recently, those games were between October and the end of November, hardly Xmas shopping dates.
Yes, corresponding to a run of poor, woeful form.
As I have clearly pointed out our attendances have generally been dropping year on year, at what point do you face facts and realise it is costing us a lot of money.
A point about the championship season average to put it into context. Once we were relegated under Gerry Francis we were generally poor throughout the next few years and our average gates I think were two to three thousand. When TC took over our gates were much worse than they are now and remember after we lost the first game in 88/89 the next couple of home gates were less than two thousand. So once the championship season started our expected home crowds would have been somewhere between 2500 and 3500. Our good form meant our crowds started to go up but it took a little while to encourage the fans to come back, we also had a number of good crowds in cups against Blackburn, Blackpool Sunderland and Norwich which if included would push the home average higher still.
So many factors affect the attendances of individual games there is little point in looking at a snapshot of 3 games in the autumn of any season, whether they are going up or going down. Better to look at the overall season averages.
Reduced gates should mean less income, I do realise that. I also understand that football is cyclical, periods of success and good form as well as the opposite are true of all clubs.
This is my favourite bit. "Unleashing a young team", some of you do not understand that if they're all fit then all of the old boys will be playing. You will go back to seeing a team with Coles, Baldwin, Woodman, Davies, Gow, Oakley, Doc, O'Flynn and then the likes of Sercombe, Bennett and Artur. Every now and then when a few injuries strike he'll chuck in a Nichols or a Grimes but if he can bring in a Gill or a Oakely on loan he would rather do that.
That's because it's evolution, Jay.
