Fans

First of all we play today not tomorrow, check the time of your post. Secondly no need for that bad language mate ok. I’ll not report you this time but no need for it. B)
Finally, see you in the Annie Road end. ;)

Enjoy that then, did we Sudworth?

Instead of wasting £50 on a ticket and travel for that shite, I spent £26 on a George Formby grill at Argos. (reduced from £40)

“Turned out nice again!” goodpost goodpost goodpost

I went for tickets on Thursday morning and was told the only tickets left were £42 tickets with severely restricted views and I thought you greedy f**king scouse tw*ts you can f**k off before I buy tickets at £42 with restricted view. Wa*kers! what planet do these pricks live on!

Well, thanks for the perfect opportunity to plug my new book, A.R.S.E.D!, the premise of which is precisely this kind of debate. Out in time for Christmas

Anyway, here is my take on the “to go or not to go” taken from the draft of the book.

Sudders, no pictures, I’m afraid.

Oh, by the way, this part of the book was needed to set the scene and is therefore quite a seriously written extract. The rest of it is much, much funnier

Saturday, 16th May
Stoke City v. Wigan

Although home games are sacrosanct and unmissable, it’s fair to say that nowadays I have to pick and choose my away games and make the most of them when they arise. There has to be a very favourable set of circumstances in play to facilitate an away trip for me these days. I have even developed a very crude algorithm to help me decide whether I should be bothered to waste any brownie points I may have accrued on a specific away match. Appropriately enough, I call it the ARSED value. Five elements make up my ARSED value. Each element is rated on a score of 1 to 10, 1 indicating that this match ranks very low on the element in question and 10 meaning there is an extremely persuasive argument for attending this match based on this factor.

A = Availability

It’s very difficult these days to argue the case for going to any away match if it is being shown live on television, especially considering the ridiculous subscription that we pay to Sky Sports for every sports channel known to man. Also, most English Premier League games are now broadcast on some dodgy foreign channel and piped illegally into many town centre pubs. Whether your team’s match will be shown in your local rather depends on your club’s standing and that of the opposition. A landlord may decide to risk a huge fine to show Liverpool versus Chelsea if he thinks the pub will be full of lads swilling gallons of ale for the best part of two hours. He may not be so accommodating if only two men and the local slapper want to watch Bolton and Blackburn hoof the ball in the air and kick lumps out of each other all afternoon. Many games are streamed live on the internet too, also illegally, but I have never really got over the frustration of buffering and the fact that site might crash or be taken offline at any second. A match shown live on free to air terrestrial television would have an ARSED score of 1; clearly there is no need to leave the house. If, however, the only possible way to keep in touch with what is happening during a particular match is to tune into the bush telegraph or rely on text messages from someone who is actually at the game, this will score closer to a 10.

R = Reputation

Having watched football for nigh on forty years, I have been to many, many grounds where I have seen many, many teams beat Wigan. Therefore, I generally don’t get that excited about visiting the actual stadiums although there still exist what I would call ‘proper’ football grounds that I still enjoy going to, especially given the vast array of drab concrete monstrosities that many football grounds have become – Wigan’s JJB stadium, to name just one. Everton’s Goodison Park, Villa Park and Molyneux in Wolverhampton are among those that I would deem to be proper football grounds. The quality and reputation of the opposition is also significant as this might have an impact on the standard of football you are likely to see. I would gladly watch every match that Wigan play, given the choice, but if it comes down to a straight call between watching them play Manchester United or Burnley, there is usually only one winner.

S = Significance

At different times of the season, the same fixture can have a very different significance. First and last games of the season are usually favoured trips regardless of the opposition, and holiday fixtures like Christmas and Easter are good times to travel away. The league table can also have a significant impact on the decision to attend a game or not. For example, I might not fancy the long trip to Portsmouth on a Tuesday night, but if relegation or a European place (ha!) depends on it then it is my solemn duty as a fan to try to get there. You should also try to attend the debut game of a big new signing to offer support as he attempts to find his feet in his new surroundings. So, there are many factors that you can use to convince your significant other that this is a must-see game. The greater the significance of the game, the greater the ARSED value.

E = Expense

This is not the most important factor by any means. Match ticket prices are all around the £30 with the notable exceptions of the likes of Chelsea and Tottenham who need you to sell your house before you can afford to step inside their ground. Obviously, the travel costs will increase the further afield you go but the differences are not huge. In any case, both these costs are dwarfed by the huge amounts of money spent on beer. I’m not tight with money and so it is not a major factor compared to other ARSED elements. However, I include it in my algorithm in the vain hope that it in the future I will have the difficult task of justifying a five-day trip to see us play Slovan Bratislava in a Champions League group game. Well, can’t a man dream? Most matches would have an ARSED Expense value of 5, purely by way of giving an index position, and won’t vary too much from this from game to game.

D = Domestics

These days, prevailing domestic plans and arrangements are by far the most important consideration for me when planning an away trip. As I work in France during the week, it is a bit rich to come home late on a Friday night then spend all of Saturday traveling to and back from London before scarpering back to France on the Sunday. If there is a game I really want to go to then I will try to take a day holiday immediately before or after the match to earn a Pink Pass and appease Helen on the Alex-caring front. For example, the day before the West Brom game we had a family day out at Drayton Manor theme park, earning me a bath-full of brownie points to spend on the Birmingham trip. Unfortunately, they are not always this easy to wangle.

This is by no means an exact science and I therefore do not have a trigger value at which point attendance becomes a certainty – if only life were that simple and straight-forward. However, an ARSED value in excess of 30 will mean a better than even chance of me going to the game. Anything much lower than that and I will be sat, depressed, at home watching the text updates on the BBC website. All that said, the ‘D’ rating is by far the most important element and, by and large, trumps the other four.

Sensas groundbait or loose maggots get them feeding eh