Hello and welcome to our summer 2024 update!
Firstly, we hope you’ve all been having a good summer thus far. While Spartans pre-season fixtures, results and performances may well have been somewhat lacklustre, at least England put on another thoroughly ‘entertaining’ display at an international tournament.
It was though a tournament that a record number of players who’ve once graced the hallowed turf off Croft Park featured in! England’s Ivan Toney featured here for Newcastle U21’s a few times, Scotland’s Che Adams was also here with Ilkeston Town once and the Czech Republic’s Jindřich Staněk also played at Croft Park many years ago for Hyde United. All of them tasting defeat at Croft Park to a Tom Wade managed Blyth Spartans as well.
Before we go on any further though, I would like to say a huge thank you to everyone that reached out after the open letter was published back in June. The response was truly phenomenal, and I think we were all really pleased with how it went down with supporters.
While we never received a proper response from the football club, we have had some dialogue with club officials in previous weeks. This has allowed us to put forward a few suggestions to help them out, that being the odd sponsorship incentive that has fallen by the way side, the 1899 club and implementing free season tickets for younger school kids rather than dishing out free individual tickets each time (taking inspiration from another NPL team).
Anyway, in some slightly more positive news, we are currently in the process of planning a 10 year reunion evening for the 2014/15 FA Cup run squad at the Clubhouse. The evening would largely consist of a talk in with the management team, and some of the key players from the cup run. Shy’s pies and pea’s would also be on offer as well!
The provisional date for the event would be Saturday 14th December, taking place after Spartans home game against Prescott Cables. All of the players and staff from the cup run will be invited along for what should be great night and a proper knees-up.
As well as the talk in, we’d be looking to hold a charity auction/raffle to give away some Spartans, NUFC and England memorabilia, with the money raised from that and ticket sales on the night going to Operation Elf.
Ran by a local charity (Community and Voluntary Action Blyth Valley) Operation Elf is a project that collects funds to provide toys and Christmas gifts for underprivileged kids within the Blyth Valley area. With the 10 year reunion taking place just before Christmas, we figured Operation Elf was the perfect charity to donate the proceedings from the evening to.
As for away travel this coming season, that’s now all booked up with local firm Liberty Coaches (sister company of Pheonix Taxi’s). They’re happy to be working with us this season after coming to the rescue late last season, and naturally we’re thrilled to be in a season long agreement with a bus company again – especially a local one!
Below you can find a list of bus prices for games we have booked in this season (12) however we do have some prices for a handful of other games later in the season.
if you’re interested in getting booked up on any of the planned busses for the season, by all means get in touch!
To help the ease the burden a bit for the regular travels, we’ll be reintroducing the old ‘Travel Club’ season tickets that the Supporters Club used to do in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s.
The 2024/25 away travel season ticket would be valid for the above 12 league games, for a fee of £225 – which would offer a total saving of £88 across the season.
Should any of the games on the list be rearranged due to the weather, or the bus be cancelled for some other reason, we’d book up another bus for one of the other games that we’ve had priced up (likely Lancaster, Ilkeston, Basford or Matlock).
A big thank you to everyone that’s bought a summer draw ticket by the way. Due to the lack of home pre-season games they have sold a bit slower than last year, so we’ll be keeping the ball rolling on this one until the Morpeth game on the Bank Holiday Monday – with the draw taking place in the clubhouse afterwards.
So if you’re up for winning half the pot and Robbie Dale’s shirt from the 2019 Gateshead game, look out for one of us!
Speaking of the clubhouse, this season we’ve decided against selling pie’s before the game for the time being.
Unfortunately Ian’s had to increase his prices again, as the cost to make them continues to rise at an alarming rate! If the demand is still there for them, we may look to try and get them in for some of the bigger games.
We will however be bringing back the old Meat Draw after home games on a Saturday though! All the profits this seasons Meat Draw’s will be donated to Blyth Foodbank.
As for Foodbank collections, we’ll be speaking to Colin and Gillian at the clubhouse to pencil a few in throughout the season. The people who run the Blyth Foodbank have been blown away by Spartans fans’ generosity over the last few years, and we hope to continue helping them going forward.
By the end of this month your new membership cards should finally be out! As for Pin Badge’s we may need to wait until the start of September for them sadly.
The reason for the delay has been a bit of a complicated one, but in a nutshell the company that processes and takes our card payments (for memberships) had paused our payments, while demanding tax information from us that we are not required to provide, or even need to have.
Thankfully after 2 months of dealing with the slowest and most unhelpful Customer Service any of us have ever known, our payments are set to finally resume.
As for moving into a fully fledged Supporters Trust, our application to do so is now completed and sent off to the FSA at last.
We would have liked to had this stage all wrapped up a bit sooner, however dealing with life as well all things Spartans related takes up more than it’s fair share of time.
We have now however hit the 100 mark for members this year! Which means we can finally do the draw for the Peter Jeffries signed shirt from the Hartlepool United game…
Congratulations Liam Allan, a winner is you! Commissioners to Scott Dewhurst and Matt Abbot, who were both a whisker or so away.
We still are yet to do the Season Ticket draw as the season is still a few days away, however that will be done prior to Tuesday’s game with Hebburn Town – so keep your eyes peeled for that over the weekend. Though I think it’s safe to say a lot of you may not exactly be thrilled to win a season ticket at the moment, given the way pre-season has gone.
So that just about wraps up this update! But before we do though, we would like to say a big thank you to Mark Wilkinson who’s been selling bin badges he’s designed over the last few months to raise funds for the trust.
If you’re after one of these, contact Mark on Facebook – though I believe he only has 10 or so left.
Finally, a huge thank you to everyone’s who’s been checking out the website and the podcast in recent months. The podcast is getting record numbers with each passing episode now, and the website is on track for 5K views for the month of July – which is yet another record.
The website will be getting a bit of facelift in the next week or so with a few new pages being added here and there, so keep an eye out for that in the coming days – as well as updates on away travel and the 2014/15 Cup run celebration.
Anyway, hopefully over the next few weeks we’ll have some good news and better results to cover and talk about, starting with next weekend trip to Ashton United!
#HowayBlyth
