Evening all and welcome to the first edition of our ‘Monthly Update’ feature, where we’ll be sharing all the random bollocks we’ve been up to over the month and things we’ve bugged the club with.
Admittedly this month, we haven’t bugged the club with that much stuff compared to normal. When the FA Trophy draw was due, we did mention to the the club that they should reduce the ticket prices (even just slightly) if we were at home, to help out a little bit with the cost of living, which would have been a bit of good PR for the club. As well as that, FA Trophy games have been poorly attended in past, especially in the early rounds. Sadly though this was never taken up for whatever reason.
Speaking of the FA Trophy game, the ticket sales were a bit of a fuck up. Not sure what happened exactly but I’d guess the game was listed as a league game, meaning those with season tickets couldn’t purchase their normal seats. Thankfully this was picked up on early after we alerted the club to the issue, though some season ticket holders still had issues purchasing their normal seats.
For those of you that follow us on twitter, you may have seen we did a poll asking for your thoughts on offering reduced ticket prices for Newcastle/Sunderland/Middlesbrough season ticket holders slightly reduced ticket prices during the World Cup. The announcement/publicity from this alone would hopefully grab the attention of at least a few of these fans, and show that as a club we’d welcome their support. 77% of you seemed to agree with this thankfully. Alas this wasn’t raised with the club, as in the past we’ve tried to recommend very similar initiatives in the past but they’ve been shut down instantly however it was interesting to see that a lot of you would support such schemes.
If you read any of the survey results on the open forum minutes, you’ll know catering at Croft Park was hot on the agenda. This is something we’ve looked at, making enquires as to how much it would cost to convert the old brick toilets with some advice from a few very helpful individuals who work in the building and kitchen trade, as well as various ways as to how this would be funded. Obviously from the forum minutes, you’ll know the club have a lot of ‘road blocks’ in the way when it comes to converting the building so, this one will take some time to progress with but I’m hopeful the club has started working on its own thing. More on that later hopefully.
As for the 1899 club, you’ll likely be aware of the efforts we’ve made to give that a bit of a nudge. Thankfully the club is up to date with draws at the moment, with them even being done on the pitch on the last 2 occasions. Sadly though it still took 3 weeks for the last winning announcement to make it onto the website/social media which isn’t great but hopefully that won’t be the case in the future. As well as that, we’ve made a push for the club to update the website, as if you go onto ‘1899 club’ section of the website… it tells you to contact Ian Evans to join the 1899 club. Ian left the football club 5 years ago…
As for the away busses, sadly the promised ‘discount’ after Wrexham from our regular bus supplier hasn’t materialised and if anything, the prices have gone up slightly. Of course finding a bus company that maintains low prices and isn’t that fussed about alcohol is extremely hard. So, it’s possible we may see a change in supplier for the first time in 6 years sadly, but hopefully it won’t come to that.
One thing that has gone up sadly is the price of the Shy’s Pies! As Ian has had to put the price of his pies up and mentioned he may need to increase them further in the future, we figured it’s easier to bite the bullet now and hoy them up to £2.50. Plus with the amount we spend buying sauces, plates and napkins etc it’s probably best we we did hoy them up by 50p.
As for the Green Army draw, congrats to Mark ‘Porky’ Walker who won a variety of Oddballs/Spartans items! Turns out he had already bought most stuff himself like so, watch out for some Spartans Oddballs stuff on eBay perhaps?
A few weeks ago we did finally get some podcast equipment! 4 decent enough mic’s that absolutely do not work with the the free software we downloaded, but we’ll fix that eventually. As for a ‘debut podcast’ episode, we’ve hit a bit of a roadblock. Wanting to kick things of with a bit of a bang, we put out some feelers to Steve Cuggy… but he’s still not got back to us. Next we up we asked if Kev and Tony fancied doing it, where we could probably ask them a few things that we perhaps couldn’t on any kind of ‘official’ club media. Alas that’s up in the air at the moment due to some plans the club has, however that may change in future.
You’ve probably seen today we’re trying out best to get a second bus on for York in the Trophy. This is due to the trains scheduled to be off, and we thought it would be a shiter if people missed out on a big day because they couldn’t make it because of the trains. So if you’re interested, please get in touch ASAP as we’ll likely need the second bus to be nearly full due to the cost of running it.
As for the website, that’s racked up about 1,800ish views over the month of November which is canny to see. Had lots of good feedback on the Lee Clark articles! Mind the next part may be a delayed, as none of us want to get sued for slander or have Lee Clark send us anymore dodgy messages on Instagram. We’ve also got a few fan Q&A’s either done and ready to post or being done as we speak, which could be very interesting.
Cheers all,
Lewis Parker and Dan Rolls