My take on this is that because the first 3500 that went on sale in the new stand flew off the shelves in about 20 minutes the other week, the club expected the rest to go quickly too when they were put on sale yesterday. However, there’s one glaring difference - a couple of weeks ago we were in a title race but now we’re not. As such, they should’ve had some more relaxed criteria lined up ahead of yestetday’s batch going on sale. They could’ve gone with the current criteria at 1pm yesterday and all members at 4pm. The fact that they didn’t at least announce a new criteria last night when it became clear that there were still plenty left is a huge oversight, especially when there was such a small window of time prior to the game that tickets went on sale.
Alternatively, they could’ve whacked the whole lot on sale the other week “subject to the test event being successful”. These test events hardly ever fail to my knowledge so it was only ever going to be a very small risk. That said, I don’t know whether their hands were tied and weren’t allowed to put the remaining tickets on sale prior to the test event but either way, all this could’ve been handled a lot better.