Leaderboard

When you look at it like this, I realise that for the most past, I’m only desperate for promotion so we keep hold of players (including potentially Maghoma), and for the additional funds that playing in the Championship brings. While the standard down here is bad and you get too many teams spoiling games, it’s great being one of the bigger boys. Stockport, Mansfield and Wrexham all promoted. I’d do all of them aways. Few more that still need ticking off too. 15.5k season ticket holders tells you the fanbase is enjoying Evatt’s tenure. And I still hope we keep hold of him as long as possible.

Is this true? We have c.16k season ticket holders, and an average home attendance of c.19k, from a town of 200k residents, within a borough of 300k. This is in the third tier of English football. Beyond the borough, we have three of biggest clubs in Europe (if not the world) and another two Premier League (for now) clubs, within an hours drive of our stadium. Beyond a very few neighbouring smaller towns, such as Atherton and Leigh, with no league team of their own, their is a multitude of competition for the “floating” fan in north west. Similar sized towns and cities, such as Ipswich, Stoke, Norwich are a monopoly league club in their county and struggle to get better crowds than Bolton, when we’re at the same level. I’d argue that our support is very robust, when measured against (admittedly slightly smaller) local peers, such as Blackburn, Blackpool, Preston and Burnley, and further afield peers such as Charlton and Crystal Palace. Short of the sort of billionaire investment that delivers success and the associated glory hunters, I’d suggest our maximum core support is unlikely to ever get beyond 30k. To have two thirds of that core support buying tickets for every game in third tier football is anything but fickle, in my opinion.

Everyone will have different opinions, personally I felt barely any confidence going into the play offs last season. This year I feel highly confident that we can get the job done. We just played the runaway leaders of the league and battered them all over the pitch. We battered Oxford and Reading recently at home who are both solid. Id fancy us to grind out a draw away and get the job done home in the 2nd leg. The crowds and support has been building over the past few years, however I think recently we've really shown our potential. Unbelievable atmosphere today, I was a bit gutted we didn't win and possibly lost our chance of automatic promotion. But I can't help but just feel immensely proud of how far we've come as a club.

Took my lads Manchester United-supporting mate with us today. His dad takes him to Old Trafford a couple of times a season, but he's going to ask if he can have a season ticket at the ToughSheet when he gets home. 😁

Run their course!! FFS! Turned club round completely, record ST sales, upgrading hotel, put in fanzone, got the town on side brought in Swiss investors, invested in good players, got us promoted, could be promoted again this season… who you think gonna come in and do better… you’re away with the fairies.

I genuinely have no idea what some people are on about. We were absolutely brilliant yesterday against a league winning team. We beat them all over the pitch and were 2 sitters away from winning. There was fuck all wrong yesterday. What else could Evatt do? If it is the play offs we beat anyone. Including the tangerine shite.

Seems like the final average attendance for this season was 21080. Second best in the league behind Derby. From memory it was just shy of 19,000 last season. It's bloody impressive stuff. For most of my BWFC supporting life I'd never have dreamt we'd average that in a third tier season.

No coach at any level coaches to leave players unmarked on the edge of the penalty areas from corners. It’s lack of communication from the playing group and nothing to do with Evatt or coaches. Seems a stick to beat Evatt with, especially for those who’ve wanted him out for months… utterly ridiculous, he’s got his faults but the positives outweigh the negatives.

Fuck the performance. We won. With a depleted front line and the only fresh legs available are 47 years old. Winning ugly is winning.

Good win today, obvs. ... But why can we play with a tempo like that today, but have Santos standing on the ball at Stevenage. Our tempo is what makes us a good side. As has been said earlier, if we lose being a good to watch team nobody will be overly arsed. It's the tepid, slow games where we create fuck all that irates the fans. Play like we did today for the rest of the season and we'll go up. COYWM.

Give over. Another negative swipe at our players. Peterborough paid £1m plus add-ons for Szmodics before selling him to Blackburn at a profit. We paid just over £300k for Charles, nobody was expecting him to be Szmodics-standard. Fuck all wrong with what we got for £300k.

Does that mean that you and Spider will now refrain from commenting on Biden and Trump? Seeing as neither of you are Yanks. I would hate to think that either the orange one or the senile one are living rent free in your heads.

Correct. Let's not forget how long it took Pompey, Sheff Weds etc to get out of this division. We've suffered a perfect storm as to why we probably won't go up in the autos this season. A horrific set of injuries at crucial times mixed with some in game nievety from the manager, a collection of absolute howlers and things just simply not going for us. It's football, sometimes things just don't happen.

Drained with it all me. Proper had enough and fuckin tired. Not enjoyed this season one bit. Constantly built up then having the life sucked out of you.

Can we not save all this bullshit for when the season has actually finished?

Evatt out? Alex Neil? Lump on vale? fuck me

It was f*king handball

If I'd have responded to this yesterday, my angry/emotional/pissed up response would have been dismissively condescending. And it shouldn't do because it's a well thought out opinion, which I'll take the time out to respond to. But it does come across as someone who thinks they have the upper hand on Evatt, the solutions to any problems we may encounter and a definitive tick-box summary of "what's stopping us" It's not that simple, so it's hard for football fans to argue/counter argue with limited coaching knowledge, but I suspect 4-3-3 has a whole host of defensive limitations. Worked great getting us out of L2, but encountered problems with it in L1. Players have been recruited with our current formation in mind. It's developed and evolved to put us in the best position we've been in for 3 seasons. The coaching team have talked extensively about tactics, fluidity, playing with a possession based attacking style. Throwing the ball backwards is part of this and is usually an effective way of us keeping hold of the ball to go on to create chances, it's happened a lot this season to good effect. It's risk vs reward which is an effective part of the way we play. The best example of countering your mentality claim, is directly related to this example. Ogbete showed great mental strength to come back from his mistake. He never shied away from receiving the ball, he took on attackers to great effect in his own half and created our first goal. I think this epitomises, along with Santos, Maghoma, Collins (other players who've been questioned), how mentally strong our players actually are. I just think it's really easy to claim what the problems/answers are as a fan without truly understanding the methodology of coaching/managing professionally. And that's not to naively suggest we have no problems and can't be better, of course we can but I trust FV, Evatt and his team to know how to do this better than someone on a fans forum. That game shouldn't be being highlighted for the reasons we aren't top 2. More celebrated for the fact we matched/bettered the champions, have players who are in great form, have players who have answered the critics, players who are back hungry from injury, to get us promoted playing the brand of football that has been so good to watch these last 4 seasons.

Wow, totally changed landscape at bottom with that result

Had some great times at Burnden, but that night. Honestly hairs standing up on the back of my neck thinking about it. It was an absolute bear pit.

He is one of the nicest and funniest people you could ever meet. Loads of us spent lots of time with him. Always good fun. Avoid politics and money !

Can't wait for all the attendnoncery over the coming days.

He’s busy imagining 18000 queue in an orderly fashion in order to be counted as they escape the conflagration; which will wait to take a hold until number 17999 escapes and then burst into flames preventing the escape of number 18000 who just happens to be @victor meldrew for the cuntish pie and pastie comment. The only reason he didn’t manage to escape is because I held him into his seat then ran like fuck to become lucky escapee number 17999.

Dempsey’s performance showed exactly why Maghoma needs to be starting. Best midfield lineup is Sheehan, Maghoma and GT.

See you blowing smoke up Bristol asses on their forum, you are one weird fucker.

It’s a dogshit idea designed to appeal to fucking idiots.

Give over, we won 4-0 you miserable get 😁

Much like if only you weren’t a smart arsed attention seeking fucking idiot

I think people just need to stop analysing every single snippet or piece of information and getting all hysterical when it doesn't transpire how they want it to. Players get injured. Players get delayed in recovery. Managers get grumpy with the press. It's fucking football, professional football and a man's game. Our cunts behave like soccer mums on an under 9s what's app group. Stop being melodramatic fannies, making shit up in your heads and focus your thoughts on beating Stevenagea and not some bizarre conspiracy dreamt up on twitter. Get a fucking grip for crying out loud you bunch of women.

By ‘better business model’ what you actually mean is more money that they’re willing to pump into a loss making L1 football club? There will be no stone left unturned from Sharon with regards to the business model, we’ll be exploring every avenue of how we are more sustainable as a club - it benefits both her and the club to do so. She’s clearly not going to chuck all of her eggs (cash) into our basket, she’s not daft enough to do so. Most businesses in a market that actually makes financial sense would be borrowing money from banks and other lenders in order to invest and improve the performance, loss making football clubs don’t have that option so she’s instead found willing investors with the acceptance that she dilutes her shareholding. I don’t see the problem in that? Clearly we need either to produce kids that we can sell on for a tidy profit (easier said than done and needs material investment in the academy in the first place) or we need the whole ‘moneyball’ buy potential low and hope we sell high to start kicking in for the club to stand on its own two feet, but it’s not something you can just assume in a business model because it’s unknown to an extent (you could make an argument that it’s something you can improve, I’d agree with that). I’d put a lot of money on the club now having a 3-5 year forecast / business model which has varying eventualities and supporting financial options for each. The idea that the ‘Swiss guys’ (aren’t they Nick Luckock’s brother?) would have a better model by chucking more cash at it just puts us back at square one. Bigger losses, more reliant on our owner to pump in cash every year and therefore more likely to go bump and drop down the leagues to start it all again (ring any bells?).

Fuckin ell there would be some late parcel deliveries. He'd spend 10 minutes outside your house fucking about until he finally posted it.

And im british But not proud to be british, equally, not embarrassed or ashamed Just an accident of birth I do think there was a time id have been very impressed with this country Not so much these days

I was thinking of flying to the southern tip of Spain to dress as a crusader for some reason.

Agreed. Type of shit that gets put on teams dressing room walls. If folk can't Google something themselves then fuck em.

2.8k isn't it? Can't imagine many coming without, it's probably the worst ground in the league to come to for a party unless they want to celebrate in style with a game of ten pin bowling or buy a new sofa.

Sat in Reykjavik restaurant paying £40 for a £6 bottle of red and £25 for a pizza. Rest of our group saying why do you keep looking at your phone and then result! Ordered another bottle of wine. Don’t f*ck it up again Whites.

attendnonce /əˈtɛndnɒns/ noun Someone obsessed about crowd sizes

Thanks for your full and comprehensive explanation of the word attendance. It was one of the first words I learned when I was doing my GCE A level in English Language in 1972 beginning as it does with A. Later on I learned that under P were the words Patronising and Pedantic to name but two. It doesn’t matter how you or I describe it in this case though.

They should have been given the top tier and fuck all else.

They were We just gave less of a fuck at the time

I think the rule bods could actually break the unbreakable premier league. Clearly out of control as they make it up weekly. Not sure I ever want to get back while it’s under this current guise.

Move nearer you daft Scouse tart

my lad went out sunday morning and reappeared last night whereve you been been to a gig where amsterdam ah, i see

Love it😃 I could see him taking the parcel out, putting it back, taking it out, putting it back, taking it out, putting it back - then clodding it over the fence.

Them were the days

It's like you're chomping at the bit wanting us to fail

The row over this shirt sums up everything that wrong with shit at the moment. 1 Two versions of the shirt 2 The more expensive version costing £125 for a fucking shirt 3 A pointless design change to the flag 4 People saying it is a lesbian colour scheme 5 Joey Barton 6 People getting annoyed because idiots on Twitter say they should. Similar design changes in previous years never created a ripple It is fucking pathetic all round.