I am absolutely sick and fucking tired of having my words miscontrued, misrepresented or ignored. I've already put posters on my Ignore list over this thread and have asked Ric to deactivate my account recently, which he talked me out of. I'll say this one more time and then I won't be making any more substantive posts in this thread for the time being, regardless of the provocation. If people have anything constructive to say to me, feel free to do it through my City Matters email.
So here's where I stand. The current system (including both the points and ticket allocation systems) is what it is but in my opinion, and I think in the opinion of virtually all of us on here plus the club, it's a mish-mash that you certainly wouldn't implement from scratch if you were doing so. There are some good things in it but it's also open to multiple abuses and contains elements that can rightfully be categorised as unfair, although different people see some of these differently.
I think we pretty well all agree that Platinum is unfair, as is the amount of tickets going to seasonal hospitality members. I'd also say most of us agree that we'd welcome better oversight and policing of the ticket distribution process. I believe the club is on-board with this as well but the question is how far will they go to make it happen and I don't know the answer to that. We need to look at the whole process from top to bottom and ensure it's fit for purpose for where we are now and remove the abuses as far as we can.
As I've already made clear, in an ideal world I'd do it differently so that more tickets are going to independent season card holders, who I represent on City Matters. But there are also people on the committee who represent competing interests. And the club may feel that it needs the carrot of away tickets to protect what it sees as their interests in respect of those groups, which means there's little or nothing I can do. But I don't just represent those with over 20k points, I also represent those who bought their first season cards this season. And, as
@edinburgh123 said, why should he be penalised if there isn't an SC branch near him? He shouldn't, which is why I believe there should be some way of people getting occasional away tickets even if they don't have 18k points but where genuinely loyal fans are at the front of the queue. Currently the SC allocation meets my requirement to have fans who maybe don't have the points able to go to games. So I "defend" it in that sense but it's definitely not perfect and I wouldn't see keeping it, when there's a better alternative, as a matter of principle. But nor would I necessarily consider it a resigning matter if the club decided to keep it.
I am not accepting any responsibility for the actions of branches or the SC in general. That's for the SC Executive and the club to sort out. I am a member of my local branch but joined pretty recently and have no position within that branch. They (Alkrington) hold regular meetings and I think most of the members would support the branch whether they had access to tickets or not. There's probably quite a few like that both locally and particularly those that aren't. I could be wrong but the branch I used to belong to (P&W) only appears to hold meetings on a very irregular basis (although I think they've had problems with a venue up till recently and haven't been a member for a few years).
I don't think I could be much clearer but if there's anything in this that still isn't clear then I'm happy to clarify.
