stevegrant

Yeah, it's on the BT Sport listings as a 20:05 kickoff as well. It's probably a database thing, they've probably just not added the Europa League as a competition that they can add fixtures to.

I think the French generally choose not to, but we're in no position to complain about that over here, when the general English tactic of communicating in a foreign country is to try playing a game of charades while talking slowly and gradually getting louder and louder

Depends what you use to value a player. As well as being a perfectly good centre-back to play 10-20 games a season (probably not quite good enough to be first choice), he also has the right attitude to play at that level in that he doesn't kick up any sort of a fuss when a better player comes in - it would have been easy and understandable for him to sulk when we brought in both Gardos and Alderweireld last summer, but he ended up signing a new contract instead. You won't find many players who are good enough but are also happy to play in bursts but to then possibly have similar periods out of the team, so he's pretty valuable to us, I think.

The best one was that in our first season back in the PL (2012-13), Watford earned more in commercial revenue than us

I think there is a balance to be struck in these circumstances. Commercially, we are miles behind the top teams and even some of the average teams in terms of commercial revenues. The new Adidas deal which allows our shirts to be sold outside of the Saints megastore is a step in the right direction, but in the position we're in we should be attracting much more lucrative sponsorships. Whether that situation would improve if we whored ourselves around the Far East and the US, I've no idea.

Credit where it's due, that was an excellent bowling performance.

Subtle advert

The group stage games will either be 6pm or 8:05pm UK time (with slightly earlier variants for games in Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan), but in the qualifying rounds I think clubs are generally free to pick whatever kickoff time suits them.

It could have been a whole lot worse, most of the unseeded teams have much smaller grounds. The unseeded teams who entered in the same round as us, for example: AEK Larnaca - 13,032 Istanbul Basaksehir - 17,800 Jablonec - 6,280 Targu Mures - 8,200 Sturm Graz - 15,400 Rheindorf Altach - 8,900 Ironi Kiryat Shmona - 5,300 So the biggest away allocation we'd have got if we'd drawn any of them would have been 890.

Perhaps, but these same people wouldn't be complaining if it was a game at Charlton. Everyone knows what the allocation is there, and everyone accepts that you don't get any more tickets than that away end holds, regardless of whether the home ends are sold out or not. Why is a Dutch team any different? If people were that desperate to go to a potential European tie (and, let's face it, how many would have booked flights to Novi Sad had we drawn Vojvodina?), they should have gone to more games last season - everyone knew that would be how the tickets would be allocated for a game like this, and there were plenty of aways last season where we didn't sell out, so it's not through the lack of opportunity.

Yep. People whinging about the allocation, look at any photo of the away section in the ground. That fence doesn't move. UEFA competition rules state that they have to offer us 5%, which they have done. They're not obliged to offer us more just because there's loads travelling without tickets (or with tickets in the home end), and you can guarantee people would be up in arms if we handed over more tickets than we needed to for the game at St Mary's.

I'm guessing the pretty frequent employment of Operation Stack on the M20 causing absolute carnage.

That completely contradicts what the official site article says.

I'd check Tunnel bookings around the day of the game, would expect they're pretty much sold out by now.

Any other threads asking for, or offering, tickets for the Vitesse away game will be deleted. Seems a fairly redundant process when the tickets aren't even on sale yet, but some people seem to have already decided they're not going to get one through SFC so are resorting to desperate acts of begging. So let's keep them all in here for those of us who will get tickets to feel warm and fuzzy about. A reminder to you all: it is illegal in both the UK and the Netherlands to sell football tickets if you are not an authorised seller - in the case of SFC, they are the only authorised seller. As far as the law is concerned, it doesn't matter if you are selling them for profit or loss, it is still illegal. There are a number of words in the first sentence in this paragraph that are the most important - I'll let you be the judge of which they are and say no more.

So you ****ed up and now you're panicking. Oops. Works for me

Why? There was never an actual plan to put on a fanzone for us as far as I can tell, that was just some weird suggestion put forward by our local plod. Just watch it in a bar in Arnhem if you don't get in the ground.

Omar Rowe played for Luton in a friendly last night.

****s sake

The whole site will be getting a revamp at some point in the hopefully-not-too-distant future

The website says "All supporters who attended at least ten away games in 2014/15 are guaranteed a ticket if they order before 8am on Wednesday 29th July".

Ticket guaranteed for ST holders with 10 or more aways from last season

I think Debayo is largely out there by default - Bertrand's going to miss the start of the season, by the look of it, and Targett only returned to training a week ago. I would have thought Martina will be on the right when called upon, he didn't look comfortable on the left against Valencia. Hesketh and Seager are slightly more surprising, but I guess they'll get allocated numbers as and when they're going to be in the first team squad.

I would have thought the election would be open to those who were members prior to Miliband resigning to prevent exactly this sort of scenario?

Indeed.