Tickets were expensive under Franny Lee if you didn’t have a season card (relative to young people’s incomes). It’s always been a choice of giving up something else to be able to go to the match for as long as I can remember. Obviously, we have some better off fans where this is less of an issue.
Going to the game is a choice. Maybe, the away games are more of an addiction and that’s why we see Blues willing to scratch each other’s eyes out on here for a dippers or rags away. Going to home games will be close to an addiction for some but less so. For example, I’ve read repeatedly on here how the atmosphere in South Stand L1 has suffered because the nasty City have put better bars in there.
My biggest gripe this week has been peole trying to dissuade others from going to the Ada Cup semi final. If Blues can go then go. If not don’t.
This forum has been great but there has been the occasional double standards. Some may remember a campaign for Blues in Colin Bell L1 to give up their season cards because they were being moved for the Tunnel Club. The leaders of the campaign were back for the next season but the poor sods who had given up their season cards weren’t. Sometimes, we need to be careful what we wish for.
Well, I go a long way back. But I do remember cycling in from Hazel Grove to Maine Rd (and back obviously) to avoid the bus fare, because I just didn't have it. Used to love that ride, actually. I was lean and very fit as a teenager, so it didn't do me any harm whatsoever. Then I think it was a tanner to leave my bike in one of the gardens (back yards, really, around the stadium, not a blade of grass in them!) looked after by the old ladies. Then 2/6d through the schoolboys entrance. Not a lot to see Franny, Nelly, Buzzer and the King. It was
the great event of the week. But it was as much as I had. Obviously, when you get older, and you've got responsibilities, maybe a flat or house to pay off, maybe a child in tow, you have to rethink it.
It's a curious situation, really. On the one hand, I don't think matches work out expensive, really, if you're under eighteen, or on a pension. (I understand that it is, precisely, a
lot more if you're in work and have the obligations I've just mentioned above). But on the other hand, the club
really don't need to raise the price of the season card year on year, even if it's not by very much, and I don't quite understand why they do it, unless it's on principle. The times are long gone when the revenue from us going in through the gate financed most of the club's needs. It would be just such a nice gesture for the club to put a moratorium on season card prices for three years or so. For those fans who went through decades and decades of football. Sometimes when it was utter dross.