Just a word here about the state of stadiums which we have to visit every week on our travels, Cliftonville, Glentoran and Crusaders, by a strange twist of irony three Belfast teams, are to put it mildly pretty basic. At Seaview it’s a covered terrace which costs £6 for adults and from which you can only see about 75% of the pitch, while at Cliftonville its £8 for adults and a seat in a stand at one end of the ground, view jaundiced, to say the least. The Glens of course (being a ‘Premier’ club), charge £9 for a stand which is basically terracing with seats stuck in and with massive beams at 15 yard intervals which each blot out about 10 yards of the pitch. Toilet facilities at the Oval aren’t even basic, in fact there aren’t any. Are we really in the 21st century I sometimes wonder? We made a deal with Portadown that we would be able to use their terracing, charge £7, rather than the stand behind the goal which is at least 40 yards away from the goal-line. Imagine our surprise when we arrived at Shamrock Park last Saturday to find that the admission had risen to £8, but at least we had a choice between terracing and stand (everybody took to the terracing). Ballymena of course are not guiltless themselves, they have cordoned off a third of the visitor’s stand and have raised their charges to £8 also. Albeit the cordoning off of the stand is not down to the football club, but down to the contactor who’s building the new safety tower, where the old O’Kane stand used to be. This job was started too early in my book, it could have been done (with little disruption), after the home game with Linfield, but no we had to have Linfield fans paying £8 and not all getting a seat in the stand, an unforgivable situation. United’s next 3 home fixtures, Armagh this Saturday, Lisburn Distillery on November 25th and Donegal Celtic on the 9th of December, would hardly fill even a third of what seating we have, if they were all lumped together. So this work could have been carried out after the Linfield game and completed in time for our next big home gate, hopefully, at home to the ‘scum’ on Boxing day. Just a little forethought could’ve avoided any unpleasantness, a little cooperation could have gone a long way. But what am I saying, this is the same council who conveniently forgot about the agreement to terminate the contract allowing the Stock Cars to use the main arena at the Warden Street venue. Just a word here about the Official United web site, re-launched amid a lot of hype, why the hell has it not been updated since the Premier league kicked off (no match reports) and seemingly our next match is at home to Linfield. The web master and I use the term in its loosest form, was at pains to point out that he now has an informer in the United camp, who’ll keep him updated on developments. Seeing as he’s not making use of this individual perhaps he’d like to loan him/her to Sky Blue Sport, as we have to ‘guess’ what’s going to happen and occasionally we get it right. In closing I’d just like to add that everybody at ‘Sport wishes striker Paul Brown a speedy recovery from his broken foot, as the saying goes, ‘it never rains, but it pours!’
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