The unofficial AFC Rushden & Diamonds messageboard

I think you'd get an awful lot of hacked off home fans if you start doing that. Give Luton the full airwair and the corners of the north and south stand that aren't open to home fans currently anyway and they will have about half the ground, all done without moving people and annoying them. Maybe sell the corners as family areas to make policing easier/cheaper.

As for "airwair experiment" games, I'd do a Mansfield, well not quite, but pick a team with small harmless away following, and make the game unsegregated. Let home fans in the airwair and with enough adverising you get your answers, especially if you do a special one off all prices the same all around the stadium and let people switch ends at half time if they so choose (yes extremely tinpot, but for me the right way of doing things, not taking away anyones choice), followed shortly after by a game where the airwair was open to home fans.

For the remainder of the season on the Ebbsfleet game stands out like this to me, Gateshead could have been done but it is a bit late now!

I'm hoping that we get 1500 for the game against Gateshead.

As for Luton, if we give them the whole of the North stand and they kick off the money we take will be spent repairing the damage. The only safe thing to do is to allocate the whole of the Airwair and the 300 seats in the South stand corner, 2700 should be plenty. The toilets and snack bar are there as well. It needs to be a practicable, controllable and workable situation. That leaves us with 3500 home tickets to try to sell. We want our home fans to come back and not be put off by the possibility of not getting a ticket.

Give them the De Banke I say. At least then they can't rip out any seats... and then make parts of the South & North 'family area's'

Stuart

Theres not a chance that i'm leaving the DeBanke for such a big game.

If something rides on the game for Luton,they will sell as many tickets as they get. But if you start moving fans from their seats you will piss them off,the club have lost enough fans in its time by pissing them off,but gone are the days of getting 2,000 home fans for a big game, so is it a too bigger opportunity to make money to waste?

I think some people are forgetting that we would allocate Luton the 2,374 Airwair seats and then they would put priority on them, i.e LTFC Season Ticket holders would snap them all up. Just by doing that it eliminates nearly all of the nastiness element, since you'd imagine the ones wanting to cause trouble would be casual fans and not ST holders.

As for the North/South Stand I say we shouldn't give them any more than the Airwair. Putting other teams in the North/South Stands has been fine but the last thing we want is the families in the side stands feeling threatened, which is definitely what would happen, just ask Cambridge. Policing costs would be more if we gave them any more than the Airwair as well, because segregation would be more difficult. Leave the North and South Stand blocks empty unless home demand is sufficient enough to need them and just try and sell out the normal parts of the N/S Stands and the PDB.

I agree with Rob.

Yeah sure we'd make a bit more ticketing money by ramming a few hundred more of their fans in the North/South stands, but I bet the price of the extra policing required would wipe out that profit.


Also, we don't want to give them too much of an advantage '12th man' wise. ;)

I'm afraid it's very naive to think that if we limit the Luton tickets so they only go to their season ticket holders that will eliminate the issue - it will do the opposite IMO, as the troublemakers will get tickets for the PDB terrace - as they did a few seasons ago when we had more fans, but they sold out their allocation.

Remember that just about the only time there has been trouble in the North Stand was that game - when the Luton fans got hold of home tickets for that area when their Airwair allocation sold out.

What if right you know what if??
Before that last game is played the resault will not not affect the final play off places are already decided and we are going to be playing Luton in the play offs.
How will that affect the team we play in that last game.
And if you think the last game will cause problems with ticketing what about when we play the second leg at home have drew away????

Can't wait me!!!

I wonder how many of the 300 or so Luton fans who infliltrated the PDB terrace that day are still on our ticket database? Sure they may not have purchased tickets for a long, long time, so should be easily spotted....................but that applies to a lot of Diamonds fans as well. We had a load of season ticket holders with Bedford addresses at one time, an easy smoke screen for Luton fans hell bent on seeing the match eh?

At the end of the day I've got confidence in the club to manage it well, Bedford Diamond will sort it all out for us .................I'm just keen for the club to make as much money as it can.