Priced out of Football?

This blog will mostly be about the new season ticket prices released by Portsmouth FC, there is a petition at the end of this blog that I would very much appreciate all my lovely readers to sign.

Here is the new pricing of season tickets as released on Wednesday 16th March.. New prices

So, I sit in the North stand for which I paid £425 for this season. A completely reasonable price considering we had just been relegated from the Prem, were in administration and fighting court battles to even have a club! Now, I completely understand the need to increase prices, most clubs do this to bleed some extra money from supporters to bolster the teams purse. I'm ok with this concept as long as its a fair increase and that you know your going to get something for your money. So, if I renew my season ticket before the end of this month I only have to cough up an extra £25, not too bad i guess, it still works out at nearly £10 cheaper than buying a ticket on the day. But why do i get 15 days to do this! Surely this should have been announced a month ago. All they needed to say was 'Hey, next month, season ticket early bird, watch this space'. Instead it was fortunate that I spotted something about it on the social network site Facebook and spoke to my mum that she looked online to see that this was announced! I then informed a couple of my friends who are season ticket holders and they were extremely grateful as they had no idea this was happening! That is terrible planning on behalf of the club and will only infuriate fans further. Also, you are unable to pay by direct/credit card for early bird, even when it charges a £5 admin fee. So, you want me to stroll around Portsmouth with £450 in my pocket?! Cheers!
And if I dont go and renew it by the 31st, I have to pay £500! No thanks!! Thats over half a months wages for me. The club have released a Q&A page which I will post here and then talk about that....  Q&A

So VAT has gone up. Yes PFC youre right, everyone knows that and is already feeling the pressures of increased prices. However, I like the fact they explain that it is still 20% cheaper than the 09/10 season, which had 4 less home games. This is true but you could look at those games as being Man Utd, Chelsea, Arenal, Liverpool, Man City, Spurs etc. Although our Premier League season tickets were very expensive there was a reason for that! Now we are playin the likes of Scunthorpe, Preston, Barnsley etc (no offence to those teams) its understandable that people arent going to pay as much to see them!
The debit/credit card situation is laughable, we couldnt do it last year because of the clubs status. OK its a year later, don't you think that maybe you could've re-negotiated by now?! Poor business Pompey.
So they're my gripes as to the new season ticket prices. But, what about the new match day prices?
The club are now putting games into categories again, although only 6 will be Cat A this season. So, this season you could sit in any stand for any game for £23 and £20 in the Milton stand. As the price list shows, next season there is no seperate prices for stands and for Cat A its £30. Thats £7 more than this season! Ok, its only for 6 games (or so they say) and 3 of these games are likely to be the relegated Prem clubs. Wait, so if they did that this season it would have cost people £30 to watch Hull and Burnley?! Um, no thanks! I had to endure both games, which we also happened to lose! And I would've demanded a refund! Cat B are £27, so an extra £4 on last year. Not so much of an increase but as some of my friends have already said, they won't be going as often next year as they just cant afford to keep shelling out more and more money.

As I mentioned at the start of this blog there is an online petition against these prices and the link is here, no matter who you support I would appreciate it if you could sign it and show the footballing world that the fans aren't happy about all these constant increases and they should remember who the game is really for... Pompey Petition

Thank you for reading and showing your support.

Respect part deux

So last time I was very lazy and just used a friends blog to make my point. However, I'm now going to add to that with some events from last week. I might rename this blog 'Refereeing - How to cock everything up'.

So Havant & Waterlooville were playing against Dorchester and some twat decides to interrupt the game in a mankini. Dumb as this is, the stewards fail to control him, or do anything at all, and so he's running around like the douche he is. Then one of the Dorchester players takes him down, not maliciously, just grabs his shoulders and wrestles him to the ground before the inept stewards lead him off. And then the ref decides to send off the tackler, no pun intended. Heres the video just to show you what the player did. I say player, turns out hes the clubs player/manager..... Video times

Now, by the letter of the law the referee should send him off as he acted violently. But, surely common sense should kick in there and say 'hey, he stopped the guy, this is a good thing'. He didnt punch/kick/headbutt the guy, just got him on the floor so the stewards could take him away. So, the ref sent off the player/manager when the game was poised at 1-1, H&W went on to win 3-1. Although Dorchester did have 2 more players sent off.

Then in an incident between Barcelona and Arsenal, Robin Van Persie was sent off after receiving a second yellow card for kicking the ball away. This happens constantly in football games and you know when a player does it deliberately as they usually throw their arms in the air and then boot the ball away. RVP didnt do this and seeing as the Nou Camp is a very large stadium with a lot of passionate fans, so it is entirely possible that he didnt hear the whistle. However, on the video that I have for all you lovely people, you can hear the whistle. This may be that the microphone was closer to the whistle than RVP, I dont know, but have a watch for yourself... Aren't videos fun

So either, he was right to be booked for kicking it away or all refs should agree on the punishment for this act. As it happens in every game and mostly goes unpunished. And I must talk about the referee yesterday who was easily the WORST referee I have ever seen! I dont think he got one decision right. At one point, our striker Dave Kitsons shirt was being stretched into a XXL and he got a free kick against him!! So Phil Crossley, Fuck you! Go read a rulebook and then maybe you can ref in the local Sunday league.

There needs to be a review of referees and their assistants as this is getting ridiculous. As Mike said they have started this 'respect' campaign but there is nothing to respect. In Rugby as soon as the whistle goes the players break apart. They dont surround the ref and they take every ruling as it is given. Maybe footballers should start doing this and we can just forget that the twat in black is even there.

So it has been another awful week for football referees and another blog slating them for their decisions.
Thats all for today, I'm bored of moaning about a lack of common sense or knowledge of the rules in the game. Something needs to be done for the good of the game, but knowing the FA nothing is going to happen anytime soon.

Goodbye all.

Respect from a lazy point of view

I went to the Portsmouth v Sheffield United game last Saturday, its handy when you have a season ticket.
Anyway, I'm not going to talk in depth about the team...In fact I'm not going to write anything more really.

My good friend MikeyT (who's blog can be accessed from the links on the right of this page) decided he was going to write a blog about Respect, in majority the campaign by the FA to look after their precious men in black. So, very shamelessly and I will owe him a pint for this! Here is a link to his blog about Respect that covers everything anyone needs to say on the issue.

MikeyTs Respect

(Many thanks mike)

So that's that, I hope you enjoyed his blog :)

Talk soon.

Taxi for Pompey

Its been quite quiet in my head lately, mostly just random bits of songs over and over but I thought I would write some more stuff down for all you lovely people.

I have 3 topics to talk about today, Pompey, Taxis and the Rugby.

So up first Portsmouth Football Club. I am really starting to think that the team have been reading my blog. As since I wrote about how fucked we were and the possibilities of League 1 action next season, they went unbeaten in February. So, well done guys. 1 draw and then 4 wins and 4 clean sheets on the bounce! That is an amazing run of results in one month and I really hope the league notice this and reward Steve Cotterill with the manager of the month award. I'm extremely happy with how things are going on the pitch at the moment and hope that they continue.
 Sky Sports News showed a special report on PFC the other night. It was an interesting watch although didn't overly show anything that us fans didn't know about. But anyway, hopefully the future is looking brighter. People are now talking about making the playoffs, my view is 'I don't want to get the playoffs'. My reasons for this are that we are still not financially backed by an owner who wants to run the club. And if we get back into the prem now, it is quite possible that stupid wages and transfer fees will be banded around and we could slip straight back into the awful situation we've been in not so long ago. Also I am enjoying travelling to different and smaller stadiums, paying reasonable prices for tickets and I'd like the team to be stable with long term players tied down before we try to make it in the big time again.
Still, I will leave Pompey alone now and hopefully will not need to write about them until the end of the season...fingers crossed.

Taxis. A great mode of transport when you need it and cant be bothered with buses/trains/walking etc. Prices of taxis have risen since i was a wee lad but that's understandable as the cost of living continues to increase. I admire taxi drivers for how they make their earnings, I certainly wouldn't want to drive drunk people around at 3am on a Saturday morning (especially from the people I saw last night!). And it annoyed me when people were moaning when we had the snow and ice and taxis were adding £1-£1.50 on top of the fare. If you don't want to pay the extra, Walk! They are doing a service in severe weather conditions that I sure as hell wouldn't drive in. During last Jan/Feb when we had the first snow I got a taxi from my friends house and the operator told me it would likely be around half an hour. That was fine by me as it was warm in my friends house and I wasn't in a rush. We decided to play some Fifa and by the time we had turned the Xbox on, there was a knock at the door and my taxi was there. So half hour was more like 3 minutes! Awesome. I gave the guy a £3 tip as I wanted to get rid of the change and was very grateful of his speedy service. So please don't moan at drivers when they are doing you a favour, unless they're a cunt. Then by all means give 'em hell.
But that story leads me onto my major gripe with taxi services. When you phone up and the operator says 'oh yeah, bout 5-10 mins' don't believe them! It winds me up when they do it because then you don't know whether to wait outside, by the window or if you've got time to cook a 3 course meal! Either have a system in place that allows you to know exactly how long its going to take or just say, I don't know.

But I cant be angry anymore as this morning has made me incredibly happy, and fortunately leads me into my third topic, the game of egg-chasing.
Firstly congratulations to England who have kept their Grand Slam 6 Nations dream alive by beating the current champions France yesterday. The final score was 17-9 and it was a fair reflection of the game. England played a sloppy penalty ridden first half but whatever Martin Johnson said at half time worked a treat. Almost from the restart we scored a try and held a solid defence for the rest of the game. Both teams could have had 2 tries in the second half but some extremely good officiating meant they were ruled out.
Secondly, it has always been a dream of mine to visit the home of English rugby, Twickenham stadium.
                         
This dream will become a reality on St Georges day this year when myself and Mikey T will go and watch London Wasps take on Bath in the Aviva Premiership. And if this wasn't enough, with tickets costing £20. I will be returning to Twickenham for my second visit just over a month later to watch the Aviva Premiership Final!! I was expecting this to cost a lot more however there were tickets available for £40 and this allows me to sit in the lower tier! I'm so happy that this chance has arisen and will be incredibly excited when the day rolls round.

That's all I wanted to say today. Many thanks for reading and I shall be back soon with more thoughts for your reading pleasure.

Humble Pie, well, the crust at least - Delays Possible

So last week I had a rant at PFC. Yesterday I travelled to Doncaster to watch us play Donny at the beautiful Keepmoat Stadium (if you get the chance to go, do it!!)
Especially as an opposition fan as the Donny fans didnt sing one song yesterday!! An awful showing from the home crowd.

And Pompey won. Not only did Pompey win, they kept a clean sheet. Not only did Pompey win and keep a clean sheet, they played very well!

So I retract the sentence that we're fucked from last week. We still need a lot sorting, especially in the boardroom but the team played well. They ran for each other, passed well (ish) and defended...ish.
But what was amazing was our first clean sheet since early Dec came when Carl Dickinson, Ibrahima Sonko and Aaron Mokoena didn't play! except CD coming on as an extra defender in the 83rd minute, but whatever. Lawrence was a good captain but needs to learn to keep passing instead of trying to twist and turn out of the middle of 4 players!

Our new loanee Jonathan Hogg was sent off in the 88th minute, this was very unfair as the deliberate handball only happened as he jumped. And as everyone says, when you jump your arms come up as leverage. but the reason it wasn't deliberate was Hogg turned his back to the ball as he jumped, so couldn't have seen where it was going and therefore couldn't move his hand to block it, therefore it wasn't deliberate. Just saying.

But a wins a win.

So well done lads, just keep playing like that please!!

That's enough about PFC as I spoke in length about them last week.

This week I wanted to talk about roadworks, I say talk, I mean rant.

There are a lot of roadworks going on at the moment. I don't mind if the government want to widen roads or improve surfaces, this is obviously a good thing yes?

Well yes but if you are going to start roadworks and lower the speed limit to 50mph with average speed checks along long stretches of roads. DO SOME FUCKING WORK!!!

Twice now this year, I have travelled North and returned the same day. Going up at 7am and coming home at around 6pm onwards. And there's no one at these works ever!! So why am I going 50mph on a 3 lane road when there's no one around?! Dumb asses!

Also, if your going to CLOSE a stretch of the m25 on a Saturday night, TELL PEOPLE!! So to let all my readers know, the m25 will be closed between junction 9 & 10 every Saturday from 10pm until 6am until the end of March 2011. This would have been good to know before the 4 lanes got pushed into 1, and of course all the idiots driving past thinking they can sneak in further up causes a bottleneck at the junction and so increases the delay.  Twats!!

I'm getting angry again now, so I will leave you all to your lives until I bother you again.

Thanks for reading and as always, comments welcome.

Portsmouth Football Club: A Disaster Story

If you do not like football, or PFC, stop reading now. This blog is about the club I have supported all my life and my feelings towards the situation we are in at the moment.

Right now there are 2 words I can use to explain what is happening with PFC, We're Fucked.

We haven't won a league game since 11/12/2010 away at Norwich, which was also the last time we kept a clean sheet. We haven't won at home since 30/10/2010. These are startling facts.

We are paying for a few seasons of success, an FA Cup win, our first forrage into European competition and some high Premier League finishing positions. This was an incredible time to be a Pompey fan but last year it began to unravel and this is why I am writing this blog.....
We were relegated from the Premier League last season following a points deduction from entering administration. I, for one, did not have a problem leaving the league with the situation we found ourselves. It gives us time to rebuild and restructure the club. This is beginning to happen, although the guy that owns the club, Balram Chanrai has said that he doesn't want to keep the club. However, if you do want to sell an asset you need to make it an attractive prospect to buyers. PFC are currently 5 points clear of the relegation zone. Not the kind of position I'd look at if I wanted to purchase a team. So, if I were Baloo, I'd invest some money into the team whilst I owned it. Maybe upgrade the facilities or buy a few low-grade players to show that we have a squad with a lot of depth. But that's just me.

One question I have been pondering this week is, Would relegation to League 1 be that terrible?

Understandably, revenue would likely drop. TV money would be less, gates and replica shirt sales would fall, although PFC do boast an extremely proud fanbase.  But, if the team did well in the league, as Brighton are this season, you would expect more fans to come to games. it would be interesting for fans to go to other grounds and likely cheaper than PL and championship tickets and travel. So, I am not adverse to dropping another league as long as the men upstairs are prepared for this and have some solutions to build a squad etc. As we would have to sell the likes of Nugent, Kitson, Lawrence and so on. But that can be helpful towards bringing in revenue and gambling on buying low budget players from the conference/lower leagues. There is also this funny little list that shows all the players who are currently available to sign for free, why haven't we looked at this and gambled on a couple of the younger players. Ill post a link to the list in a second but you will see that there are some players released from the likes of Notts Forest academy. Teams like this boast incredible standards from their academies so we should look into it! I know wages will be a matter but if you offer an unemployed 18yr old pro footballer 5k a week, I'm sure he'll bite your hand off! Anyway, here's the list. Free Players, right here.
This would be a great way to build a decent League 1 team and challenge for promotion on a budget.

Moving on to talk about the current "team". I really don't know where to begin!!
How about the fact that we have 2 very good championship players under contract who we wont play for the rest of the season?! Um, WHAT!!
The reason we wont be playing them is that if we do, they instantly get a new contract next season on their current wages (estimated 20-30k a week). Which we clearly wont be able to afford, especially if were relegated. However, I have a few options that could be discussed whilst these 2 are sitting around doing sod all.
1) Drop the clause, they both know our situation and I'm sure they would understand that right now we cant promise to be able to pay those wages next season.
2) Keep the clause but ask them to take a pay cut to 15k or whatever we can realistically afford.
3) Apparently teams were looking at Michael Brown in the January transfer window. If he isn't going to play the rest of the season, teams wont be able to see how he's performing. So, tell him and Hughesy to play to keep them in the shop window so to speak. And to keep tabs on any clubs interested in them.

As for the rest of our squad at the moment, STOP DROPPING YOUR HEADS WHEN YOU MISS OR CONCEDE! This is going to happen in a game of football. Yesterday, when Derby scored, Liam Lawrence went ballistic at the defence. This was understandable as we always make schoolboy errors to let other teams score. But, just shake it off, its a game, we conceded, fine. Get the ball back on the centre spot and go for it! We eventually equalized and that's fantastic. But, we now need to look at keeping clean sheets and winning games. Realistically we need to win the next 4 home games and hopefully pick up points away as well. To do this we really need a new back 4, Hreidarsson is getting old and does not have the pace to play at left back against pacy younger right midfielders he faces. Sonko, well, um, yeah that's enough said about him. Moko is a decent CB but keeps booting the ball forward rather than looking for an outlet, who has an excellent partnership with Ricardo Rocha (when he's fit) but shouldn't be captain. Halford is a good player but keeps on getting caught out with players running across him, this has happened in the last 2 games when we have conceded. Up front, Kitson is useless, flicking it on to nobody, I'm not sure what happened to him as he used to play well when he first arrived. Nugget is a good player who knows this is his level but needs target practice to know not to put it at the keeper every time.

That's enough for now I think. We really need to start playing well and do everything we can to win games and stay in the championship. Easier said than done I know but I will use the same argument that everyone in the pub uses. Your job is to play football, one dream a lot of people would love to come true. Your making money in a week that some people don't even make in a year. Think about the fans and play out of your skin for them.

So I bid you all farewell, I hope you enjoyed reading my gripes and possible solutions for the club.

I will always support PFC whether we're relegated or whatever happens.

                  Portsmouth til I die. Play up Pompey, Pompey Play up.

\m/ WACKEN!! METAL!! WACKEN!! \m/

So, as the title says, Wacken is a metal festival. I went there in 2008 and after a lot of nagging from my ex-RRP co host Mikey T, I am going again this year. Mike purchased his ticket a while ago and in the previous week they announced they were into the last 10,000 tickets. This news + Mikes nagging + overtime pay = Wacken ticket for me :D

I didnt do any festivals last year which was a little bit upsetting as I do enjoy them. So this year I have taken the plunge and will be making the trip over to Germany once again to listen to some of the finest metal bands of this time.

However, this morning I have been sampling each of the announced bands for Wacken (there are more to come) and have got a little problem. Out of the current 64 bands that are going to be playing, I like about 60! Which is a very good thing as I am going to a festival where I will enjoy 96% of the bands. Here is a link to the current announced bands Wacken Bands....so far. Unfortunately, I will not be able to see them all. So myself and Mike will have to have a long discussion about who we will see when the times/stages are announced.

I'm very happy that I will (hopefully) be able to see Ozzy Osbourne for the first time. He wasn't on my Bucket List but I still want to see one of his shows and not pay the prices for his individual shows, problem solved.

The reason I like festivals and the whole festival season in general is it gives you the best opportunity to discover new bands and new genres of music. This year I will likely see Judas Priest, Airbourne, Devildriver, Kreator and others not for the first time but purely as I really enjoy their music. But i will also see bands I hadn't even heard of until today, i.e. Sirenia, Blowsight, Sodom etc. And for me that experience of discovering new music is just brilliant as one of my favourite hobbies/things to do is just sit back and listen to music.

If you have before or get the chance to go to a festival, do it!

And now I bid you farewell until the next time I have something unnecessary to tell you all.

WACKEN!!!!
(sorry, just a little bit excited)