stevegrant

The whole point being to build his stamina up, presumably.

Usually pretty close to kickoff

They've made 8 changes from Sunday. We've made 8 changes from Sunday.

I would assume that direct flights into Milan are ludicrously expensive now, so you're then looking at an airport within an hour or two on the train, so that gives you the options of Turin, Bologna, Verona, Genoa, Nice. Worst comes to the worst, Geneva's probably not the worst option either, there must be a train from there to Milan.

This, basically.

Not especially. They still had to establish the definite demand by selling those tickets - if they'd only sold a few hundred at the point at which they went on sale to all season ticket holders, they could quite reasonably have decided that the 5,000 would be sufficient.

A mess.

God, so much this. ****ing hell, we really do have some absolute ****s as "fans".

Also needs to be taken in the context that English clubs have traditionally not treated the group stages with a great deal of respect in the past, so the team that plays on the Thursday has generally been significantly different to the team that plays in the Premier League on the following Sunday. Clubs like Spurs and Liverpool have had the squad depth to be able to deal with the extra games, so a "weakened" team they can field is still strong enough to compete against most Europa League opponents, given that Spurs and Liverpool would be top seeds in the EL group stage. We don't have the same depth as them by any stretch of the imagination, but the fixture list hasn't been too unkind. Of the six games immediately after EL games, there's only really Man City away where you'd automatically assume we'd lose the game anyway.

Already done. Friday 9am: ST holders with 2+ aways Monday 9am: ST holders with 1+ away Tuesday 9am: all ST holders

Oh, without a doubt. I reckon around half of the tickets for the away end at Vitesse Arnhem a year ago ended up in the hands of people other than whose season ticket was used to buy the ticket in the first place.

They won't be delivered for ages yet. Saints won't even have them in their possession, they have to submit all of the personal information to Inter first so it can be printed on the tickets, and then they'll be sent to the club to distribute.

Firstly, I never quite understand why people give a flying one what that bunch of seven-fingered freaks think. They're completely irrelevant to everyone apart from the likes of Crawley and Stevenage. Secondly, surely many people will want items that commemorate this European "adventure" (for want of a better description), why is this a big deal?

I told them this would particularly irritate you, so I'm glad they took my advice

Would suggest we look to sell the 5000 we've got so far before worrying about getting any more...

Oh, so true. Couldn't believe what I was seeing on Twitter, with people saying they'd emailed Inter's ticket office about it. ****ing idiots.

Be'er Sheva tickets are now on general sale, so as long as she is on the club's database, she should be able to buy a ticket. We have to collect them out in Israel anyway, so won't be a problem with postage, etc. Will just need ID that shows the correct name.

Can back this up. When I went there a couple of years ago en route to San Marino, Italy were playing Brazil in a friendly that night (think the game was in Switzerland) and yet it took us more than an hour of jumping on and off trams and wandering around to find a single bar that was showing the game, and even then the two of us made up a "crowd" in the bar of around 8 or 9 people. Whether that's just because they have such little interest in the national team beyond tournaments or not, I don't know, but there didn't even look like there were places that should show football anywhere.

Particularly impressive as at no stage on Saturday did we play the diamond formation.

Pretty sure the ticket site won't be changed, it's a separate third-party system. To be fair to them, they've made a lot of improvements recently on the design of the ticket site so it works on mobiles, tablets, etc, but getting actual functionality improvements will be trickier (and probably more expensive).

The session management is awful, and the "tick this box to keep me logged in" functionality simply doesn't work. Oh, and when "auto-buy" things (season ticket renewals, home cup games, etc) go on sale, it puts everybody on your friends/family list in your basket. Other than that, a flawless system...

Sponsors and corporates jumping the queue shouldn't be remotely surprising - they've had priority access to away tickets for years. Similarly, supporters groups with a genuine regular fanbase also get access to tickets based on their average sales per game over the course of a season. As an example, I believe London Saints sold, on average, around 35 tickets per game last season, so would fully expect them to be entitled to that amount for Milan (perhaps more if they can demonstrate those applying through them qualify), and obviously they'd have had as many as they wanted for Be'er Sheva. Suspect they won't get their full amount for Prague, so Terry will presumably have to allocate them to those who went the most last season. As far as I can tell, most of the officially recognised supporters groups DON'T get ticket allocations for away games anymore, mainly as they just don't sell enough tickets to justify it. Cardiff Saints sold so few in recent years (no idea how active they are anymore, but suspect most of them decided to sort their own arrangements) that their allocation for each away game was cut to 1 per game last season and is now 0 because they didn't even use that allocation.

I've seen a 900-and-something.

The last I heard was that they were almost certainly going to run some sort of transport. No idea whether they'll charge for it, how much it is, etc, though.

Most likely people who won't be going to the actual games, tbf.