We only got 26,000 at £15 a ticket and they effectively admitted at the Fans Forum that they made a huge cock-up by putting the price up for the Aalborg game. They'd made a mistake so they put prices down to £5 and have been over-whelmed.
In hindsight, it would have been fairer to allow until Sunday for Citycard holders to buy the available seats and ST holders to claim theirs, then for a couple of days carry on charging £5 but throw it open to Access Card holders. Then put them on general sale at £10.
The other mistake was allowing people to buy 6 each - should have been no more than 4. I'd be really miffed if I was a Citycard holder and couldn't get a seat for our biggest game in many years. I think they will do it differently next time (and hopefully there will be many more games like this one over the next few years).
But I'm sure they wanted a full stadium above anything else. I bet the owners were watching in Abu Dhabi and couldn't believe the sparse crowd. Let's give the club some credit for taking some positive action, even if some of it hasn't been thought through particularly well. Wardle & Mackintosh would not have done what ADUG & Cook did. As an accountant, Mackintosh would rather have had 23,000 at £20 a ticket than 47,000 at £5 a ticket.
I also bet that Cook will say publicly that the club could have done things better in hindsight. We are moving forward.
