AOB: Conference Sponsorship news

In between publishing their usual mix of homophobic bile and general scaremongering nonsense, this morning's Daily Mail found time to report this:

"There may soon be a full set of the major English professional football competitions looking for new backing such is the sponsorship crisis facing the game.
"The latest sponsors in discussion over whether to renew a title endorsement are online betting operation Blue Square, whose three-year support of the Conference divisions below the Football League will terminate at the end of the season."

Not to be outdone, The Conference's slick PR machine moved swiftly into action this afternoon with this statement:

"In light of an article published today in the Daily Mail, the Football Conference and our Title sponsor Blue Square, wish to distance ourselves from the report suggesting that Blue Square are to terminate their sponsorship at the end of this current season."

Everybody feeling reassured? Time will tell whether Blue Square feel it is worthwhile to sign up again now that the league isn't televised. But given the Conference board's long list of previous faux pas', I think it would have been appropriate to send out the following image with the press release:

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The more things change, the more they stay the same

To keep my mind occupied as we wait with bated breath for the fixtures to come out (come on, it can't be just me who wants to know when to book that romatic weekend in, er, Gateshead) I've been reading a very good book.

Published by When Saturday Comes, it is entitled Power, Corruption, and Pies vol. 2 (it is, as you've probably guessed, a follow up to Power Corruption and Pies vol. 1), and contains a collection of the best articles published in WSC between 1997 - 2007.

As befits a publication from Britain's most consistently interesting football magazine, there are some extremely excellent pieces. One which caught my eye was an interview with Claude Le Roy undertaken during the 1998 world cup, in which our erstwhile manager and then custodian of the Cameroon national team says football offers "une jouissance permanente" - a permanent orgasm. One suspects he may have revised this view after coaching the likes of Ashley Nicholls and Danny Webb, because if not I feel very sorry for Mrs Le Roy.

Another which struck a chord is entitled Crossing the Vauxhall Bridge, and concerns overspending chairman in the (then) Vauxhall Conference. What hit me most was how little has changed in the 11 years since Simon Bell wrote the article in November 1997. Consider the following quotes:

"One of the most irritating things about the Vauxhall Conference wants to be - really wants to be - the Football League. It's bit embarrassing."

"The result is a league in limbo, a small pool containing a few potentially league-sized fish and a rather larger shoal of tiddlers living beyond their means in the fond belief that they will one day grow legs and scramble out of the swamp - and to hell with the cost."

"Division Five', wherein 22 thrusting and ambitious clubs would joust for the right to play Hartlepool has never quite become a reality."

Sound familiar? If you changed a few of the names the article could still apply today. For Colne Dynamos and Sittingbourne then, substitute Farsley Celtic, Salisbury, or any of the other teams currently on the financial precipice.

It's depressing on two levels really. One, because chairman are still stupid enough to bankroll these nothing clubs in the vain hope of achieving some modicum of success. And two, because despite their claims to the contrary, the Conference management continue to do nothing of consequence about it. Instead they prefer to fiddle at the edges, everytime promising a tough regime but allowing teams like Weymouth overpsend again and again and again.

So despite these boasts of Setanta-enforced austerity from all and sundry, what's the betting that by January they'll be more than one chairman overstretching themselves to try and push their club into the promised land? Who knows, our own Chairman George might be one of them.

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Ticketing shambles part two

Got my tickets for Sunday, and it seems that, compared to some people, I got off fairly lightly: three are in one row, and two are in the row behind. Not a complete disaster, and it puts a nice cushion between me and my dad who is, as I've mentioned before, a bit of a nightmare at football matches.

There was some clown from the tickets.com on Radio Cambridgeshire this morning trying to say that any mistakes made were down to their computer system. It always makes me laugh when people try and put the blame on computers as if they're some kind of mysterious entity that cannot be controlled. Computer technology works on logic, therefore it can't make "mistakes" unless someone enters some data incorrectly somewhere along the line. When asked by the presenter whether his company were to blame, the ensuing silence spoke volumes.

Still, at least they made an apology of sorts, and I'm sure this whole sorry fiasco will be a distant memory if we get the right result against Torquay. Here's hoping...

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Ticketing shambles

When it comes to consistent football-related buffoonery, I don't think anyone - apart from perhaps Newcastle United - can beat the folk that administer the Football Conference.

No task is too simple for these idiots to cock up. Not content with creating the shambles of player registration-gate (there's a great article about that in this month's When Saturday Comes by the way) they now seem to have employed the worlds worst agency to oversee the sale of tickets for the play-off final.

When you consider that both of last seasons finalists managed to sell their own tickets (via agencies) without any major problems, you have to wonder what possessed the Conference hierarchy to think that they could do a better job in a shorter space of time? Even if they did want to take over sales themselves, why not just use the same system we used last year?

Instead, they've (unsurprisingly) gone for the cheapest option. Or at least I assume it was cheap, given that the website portal you visit to purchase tickets looks like it was designed in five minutes by a myopic monkey armed with Wordpad and Microsoft Paint.

It seems the shoddiness doesn't end with the aesthetics. Despite the fact you can't chose where you sit, the agency seem to have failed to put groups of people together. According to reports on the CUFC messageboard, people who booked, say, five tickets at the same time have found that three of their party will be sitting in one section, and two in another.

In the immortal words of the dastardly Richard Littlejohn, you really couldn't make it up. There are going to be (at the most) 42,000 fans in a 90,000 capacity stadium this Sunday. That they can't manage to even group people properly beggars belief. What on earth are we paying a booking fee for when nobody is putting any thought into this process?

My tickets aren't here yet, and I wait with baited breath to see whether they will be all together or not. The sad thing is that the vast majority of people coming to Wembley will not be regular attendees at United games. Some will inevitably blame the club if this mess causes them to have a bad experience, meaning we could be losing future supporters through absolutely no fault of our own.

No doubt the Conference will continue to use slogans like "For the love of the game" and "Real football, Real fans", when in reality the lust for money dominates at this level in the same way that it does in the Premier League. They certainly don't put the needs of the "real fans" first. Let's hope we get the right result on Sunday so that we can wave farewell to this poxy league (c) Chris Wilder) for good.

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It's the end of the world as we know it...

...but funnily enough, I feel fine. No swine flu on this blog just yet, oh no, although there have certainly been a few swines associated with CUFC down the years.

Nevertheless, I'm getting a bit worried that the government might decide to ban mass gatherings such as football matches for our own protection as they seek to control the pandemic. Can you imagine our play off games having to be played behind closed doors? Actually in Histon's case it would probably result in an improvement in atmosphere, though I don't think ourselves, Stevenage, or Torquay would be so pleased.

After getting over the disappointment of Sunday, I'm feeling more upbeat about our chances of dispatching The Chavs and making it to Wembley once more. Cardy apparently shares my confidence:

"We did under-perform when we played them down there and we shot ourselves in the foot by conceding a couple of goals," our assistant manager notes in today's CN. "so the lads won't need winding up for this one."

Always good to hear, although I'd be a bit worried if they needed winding up for a play-off game to be honest. Having heard Carden talking on the Non-League show last week, he seems a bit more at ease with the media than the Brabinator, but I couldn't agree less with his comments (also in the CN article) about the Conference deserving more promotion spots.

Since the two-up, two-down, system was introduced, so many terrible sides have made it into what is described in the afforementioned article as the "elite 92"; exactly how elite can a competition which contains detritus like Accrington, Macclesfield, and Dagenham, be exactly? That's not to say they don't deserve to be there on footballing merit, just that the more promotion spots you make available, the higher chance there is that teams who don't have the fanbase or infrastructure to support league football will start climbing the ladder.

If anything they should be making it more difficult to get into the Football League. We and the rest of the relegated teams are here because we deserve to be here, and just because there are a lot of big (in non-league terms) teams in the Conference at present doesn't mean we should be able to escape this awful division without doing our time.

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AOB: Grounds for Concern

I'll confess that, much to the chagrin of those that know me, my memory isn't the best.

Therefore it's probably not a surprise that, for me, pre-season seems like a lifetime ago. Those of you with a greater degree of mental dexterity will remember that our first pre-season match was away to Kings Lynn. I can't recall much about the game, which featured such luminaries as Matt Halliday, Ramon Calliste, and Pat Bexfield, but what I do remember is that Kings Lynn's stadium, The Walks, is a decent arena for a club of their size.

So I was surprised to see that The Linnets have been demoted from the Conference North this week because their ground doesn't meet the requirements of the league. You may remember that Cambridge City were relegated from the Conference South for similar reasons.

The specific reasons for the demotion seem to be unclear, but I can't for the life of me imagine how that ground can't be suitable for the level of football they're at. That the Conference are kicking them out is endemic of the wider problems surrounding stadium requirements in non-league football. This is not particularly a dig at Histon (for once), but when you see grounds like theirs, Accrington's, and Dagenham's being declared fit for the football league, you wonder what possible basis there can be for expelling the likes of Kings Lynn and City.

This issue extends all the way down the pyramid. Barely a week goes by without the BBC Non-League show featuring some little club from step six or seven who are being relegated because they don't have enough seats, or turnstiles, or whatever. No matter that their average crowd is three men and a dog; you have to comply to these ridiculously high standards or you're out.

In my opinion the whole ground grading system needs to be ripped to pieces and redesigned from the bottom up, with common sense being used rather than strict adhesion to the rules. What I do know is that, as a fan, the match day experience at Kings Lynn is a lot better than at some of the supposedly superior grounds we've visited in the Conference in the last four seasons.

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AOB: Points of dis-order

It always gives me great pleasure to highlight what a shambolic league we play in, so I couldn't let this weeks latest round of points deductions pass without comment.

For once I don't think the Conference can take all the blame for these continuing problems surround player registration; you'd have to be a pretty half-arsed administrator to send something important by fax and not check that it had arrived at it's destination.

But moreover it amazes me that in this day and age a so-called professional organisation is relying on people faxing them important stuff in, when much quicker and more reliable electronic methods of communication are available. Why haven't they changed over to something a bit more modern? And why are the points deductions handed out on a seemingly random basis? The silence from the leagues' head honcho, Dennis Strudwick, who declined to speak to the BBC's Non-League show on Monday, spoke volumes.

I've said it before on here and I'll say it again now; if the Conference wants to be regarded as the fifth division of the football league (an erroneous line that is often trotted out by lazy journalists and deluded managers and fans) they need to pull their socks up and be a bit less amateurish.

And while we're on the subject, it's a bit rich hearing the lovely Steve Evans, boss of tonights opponents Crawley, describe the Leagues rules as "archaic". Only in an archaic division would Crawley, a team that have continually breached the rules over the last three years, be allowed to continue competing without any significant action being taken.

Football-wise, you can't accuse Evans of not knowing his stuff though. In the preview of tonights match on the Crawley website he states that "My relations reliably inform me that it is the Abbey Road end of the ground that will be in full voice..." Rumours that the surviving members of the Beatles are to record a new album in the Supporters Club have yet to be confirmed.

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AOB: Being unfaithful

Yes, I have to confess that I've cheated, spurning the chance of a romantic weekend on the English Riviera in favour of a quick one-dayer in London. I knew it was wrong, but strangely it just felt so right.

I am of course refering to last weekend, when I took in Fulham vs Man City at Craven Cottage instead of making the long journey south west to Torquay.

It was the first Premier League game I've been to since 2001, and I have to say that I quite enjoyed the experience. We were seated right in amongst the Fulham "hardcore", and the atmosphere was pretty good, with plenty of witty songs (ex-Scummer Jimmy Bullard is apparently "better than Steve Gerrard, and fitter than Frank Lampard") and a bit of banter (yuk, I loathe that word) with the visitors from the blue side of Manchester. It was certainly far from the sterile experience that top flight matches are often portrayed as.

Of course Fulham is probably the least Premier League-like Premier League ground, so that could have something to do with it, but another thing that impressed me was the quality of the football on show. Even two mediocre sides (City were missing Robinho, so instead had Darius Vassell spearheading their attack) produced the kind of play that is light years ahead of what is usually served up in the Blue Square Premier league; there were no aimless hoofs into the channels, or corners shanked straight out of play, and misplaced passes were few and far between.

What I'm trying to say is that while there is a lot wrong with the Premier League, the standard of the football certainly isn't one of those things. With this in mind it makes me laugh when Setanta try to insist that the BSP is "proper football". I will always support United at whatever level they're playing at, but I don't relish that we are in such a terrible league at present. "Proper" football is exciting and high quality and played out in front of a packed crowd. It isn't 22 cloggers taking part in a competition to see who can launch the ball the furthest in front of 800 people in some loathesome hell hole like Ebbsfleet or Histon.

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