Results tagged “football” from Birmingham Post - Lifestyle Blog

The thing that worries me most about Birmingham City getting relegated to the Championship is that I might have to go and watch them every week. Even an average Premier League team is on television enough to make it possible to see every goal and costly individual error without setting foot in the ground, but if we go down I might have to go down and that isn't going to be fun.

Up until a few years ago I had a season ticket in the main stand at St Andrews, and was in the habit of meeting the guys I went with around two hours before kick-off in The Sportsman on Garrison Lane. A few pints in a pub shorn of all its furniture to pack more people in, at least I assume that's what happened -- I never went in when there wasn't a game on so the pub could possibly just have had no chairs or tables at all.

A combination of Brady et al deciding to evict a section of the people that sat in the main stand, in favour of people who could pay for padded seats and access to a bar offering us much worse tickets as replacements, and the spiralling price of watching poor football meant that I stopped going to every game. Once out of the routine it's difficult to rouse yourself to go and watch on a cold Tuesday night, or a cold Sunday at four o'clock especially when the game is on TV. Much of my footballing budget was transferred in to watching England more regularly, and while I'm not sure the standard of play was any higher (and the frustration levels are much the same) at least I got to go to Frankfurt or Barcelona rather than Small Heath.

I still go to St Andrews and in truth it probably costs more to do it the way I do (£40 to watch us throw away a two goal lead against Liverpool, £40 to watch Agent Ridgewell put through his own net against the Villa), but this year I've seen almost every game home and away -- through a combination of pixelated internet feeds and darkened rooms in pubs.

Whatever David Sullivan and Karren Brady have done to attract the attention of the City of London Police and their football corruption enquiry here's a few things they've not done:

• Looked after the old fans in preference to corporate newcomers. I used to have a season ticket in the old Main Stand, great seats that we had way before Steve Bruce and the Prem became a possibility, and we were surrounded by people who'd had their seats for much longer. Then we had a letter telling us that those seats would become premium seats, and as such thousands of pounds a season. We were offered season tickets elsewhere in the ground, but at that time the ground was full and available seats were not in good supply. Our group of four decided against keeping up our season tickets. Although I still go down occasionally, I sit in the Kop and laugh at the empty (but now comfortably padded) seats opposite.
• Priced tickets reasonably for the opposition. While blues fans enjoy winding up villa fans, in a friendly way of course, charging £45 for an away fan to visit us isn't nice. It doesn't foster goodwill around the country. It's about money, the sort that football is both awash with and simultaneously moaning about not having enough of. The obsession with money that turns a play-off game into a "£50 million game" rather than one about glory, about promotion and struggle. Blues don't have to try so hard to be like that.



• Publicly denounced the 39th game idea. Although it was David Gold that ended up de facto spokesman for the stupid plan to add a Premier League game to be played abroad, after all the other club owners sensibly shuffled away, it wouldn't have taken much for either of these high-profile media figures to say "I don't think that's a great idea".