I’m sure you’ve all read Stuart Webber’s thoughts about the level of noise inside Carrow Road, in his latest interview with Along Come Norwich
I think it’s something that a lot of fans are acutely aware of, especially if you don’t sit in the Barclay or The Snake Pit. I’ve sat in both those areas quite a lot over the years, in the days when a casual ticket was easy to come by. I have only been able to afford a season ticket since the payment by instalment options was introduced around 15 years ago and since then, due to the success the club have had, crowd numbers have increased.
I can remember watching Spurs at home in the first division, mid-week and getting 15,000 fans – that was an average crowd in the late 80’s, very early 90’s.
The increase in crowd numbers after the explosion of the Premier League has meant that a season ticket is now the only way to guarantee your seat each week and it does of course, save you the hassle of booking tickets online or ringing the box office.
For the last 15 odd years, I’ve had a season ticket, for the reasons mentioned above. I have a job that involves shift work and that includes weekend working, so it takes quite an effort as well as using up annual leave to make sure I get to every game.
Before my youngest came along, eleven years ago, me and Mrs T used to sit in the South Stand, right on the halfway line, halfway up the stand. It’s not too far away from the away fans but it isn’t a noisy stand. There are plenty of families but also a lot of corporate guests sitting near to the top of the stand.
Since we started taking our son, when he was five, we’ve sat in the upper tier of the River End, because it’s a family area. The reasons for that were that we didn’t want the boy exposed to too much bad language too early in life. There’s plenty of time for that and at age eleven, it seems the language of the Primary School playground would now make a Snake Pit veteran blush, seriously.
It’s also cheaper in the family area and that again is an incentive to sit there. The thing you do clearly miss is atmosphere. It is very quiet up there, generally. The people that sit around me are all either older people, many past retirement age or young families.
I get that the club wanted to set up such an area and indeed, we have taken advantage of it but I can’t help thinking that it has perhaps contributed to stifling the atmosphere inside the ground.
The Barclay has always been the place to sit or stand, if you want to join in with singing. Going back to the 80’s, LeeBoz and I used to stand there with the cage that separated the home fans from the away fans and always with a barrier at our backs, so that we wouldn’t get crushed when Kevin Drinkell scored.
It was great and I have very fond memories of those games, getting in the ground an hour before kick off and just soaking it all up.
I’ve recently read various things on social media from fans in the Snake Pit/City Stand and Barclay reporting that club stewards are forever telling them to sit down, another atmosphere killer.
The club have got to decide what they want to do, if they want a noisy stadium decisions need to be made and I’m sure that they’re more qualified than I am to decide how to do that.
The demographic of our crowd is getting older because they are season ticket holders and cannot guarantee a ticket any other way. That’s why I have a season ticket, rather than moving around the ground wherever the best seats crop up. You could do that when only 15,000 were watching the games.
Because these season ticket holders hang onto their tickets, is there a difficulty in getting younger fans, who will naturally be louder and more vociferous in their support, into the stadium?
The club needs a large bank of season ticket holders because they supply a large bulk of the club’s income. By no means the biggest though, if City are in the Premier League. At the moment though, they aren’t, so season tickets are a valuable asset.
The club need to think about this and how to progress forward to create a noisier stadium.
An obvious answer is to increase the capacity of the ground but while not in the Premier League, that is too much of a financial risk. If they are stable in the Premier League then there is still a problem.
The City Stand is the stand that would be developed and would need developing. That stand contains a lot of wealthy and long standing season ticket holders – where would they go to for the 8-10 months such a building project might take?
Would they put up with not being able to go?
After that, when it’s all shiny and new, there will then be an issue over the extra crowd numbers and how they get to the ground. If 10,000 more people are coming into the areas around NR1 on a match day, where do they park their cars? I’ll leave you to have a think about that.
As I say, these are issues for the club and not a bloke who runs a football fan site to sort out.
Maybe some sort of radical move of season ticket holders is required. I for one would now be happy to move to a noisier area but getting three seats together would no doubt be problematic.
It’s a tricky situation and not just as simple as ‘people should start singing.’
OTBC