Crowd tonight of 17,000 - they are going for promotion, remember!
I was there as a guest in hospitality. Thought I'd be seriously outnumbered by genuine Reading fans. Not at all. Of the ten in the box, the make up was as follows:
2 x Arsenal
1 x Chelsea
1 x West Ham (supporting us)
1 x Sunderland
1 x Celtic
1 x Hearts
1 x Chinese guy at his first ever game (I did my best to win him over to CAFC because of ZZ)
1 x Horsham (first ever proefessional match, supporting us)
me
I knew more about Championship football than the lot of then put together. They didn't even know who Parky was.
And we complain about Johnny come Latelies!
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"1 x Chinese guy at his first ever game (I did my best to win him over to CAFC because of ZZ)"
I thought you lived in Glasgow and had been many a time
What i mean is the Valley express service, which carries football fans keen on top class football, but not neccesarily Charlton fans, to the Valley. I used to work in Slough and know several Chelsea fans from that area, that went to Reading for a cheap alternative to the Bridge, watching Premier football.
As for Reading, the Stadium was nice but it still lacks that authentic soul of a real ground built over years that even places like Selhurst have.
they still bring more away fans than us ;-(
Is that why we ran promotional campaigns urging fans to come to the Valley and see the likes of Zola, Owen and Henry?
It sounds as though Weegie was in a corporate entertainment area and I'm sure we've all gone to events as part of our jobs that we wouldn't otherwise have attended because it was free.
As for Valley Express...this was more good, enlightened marketing by the club. Premiership tickets are not cheap and it isn't easy to get to the Valley by train from deepest Kent, neither is there a wealth of parking available locally. So VE enabled fans who otherwise might not have attended the chance to do at a relatively cheap cost and be dropped outside the ground.
After we returned to the Valley its fair to say that we had a lot of catching up to do in terms of energising our latent support. A few years of playing at Selhurst and then Upton park and a generation of neglect before that saw a lot of supporters simply get out the habit of going. VE helped turn that around to the point that our active fan base is still pretty big and much larger than any other south London club you care to mention. Of course success brings both imitators and jealousy, and the scheme has attracted bucketloads of both, which to underline the point shows how well it has worked.
And it does the job.
Had to laugh at Wyn Jones, though - what did he call it, Rick Shaws .... ?
;o)
Ha, ha, very good.
I was also in hospitality at Swansea (I'm a right lush, aren't I?!), and that was full of real Swans fans - just expected at least a couple of them last night to be real Reading. Missed the banter, esp with our connections: Parky/ Murty/ Lita etc.
Not really fair, Rothko.
My mate Trev, who lives in Newbury, has been watching Reading for 40 years, including probs around a dozen away games each season. Now he's as one-eyed and partisan about Reading as I am about Charlton.
After all the lower division stuff that he's spent a lifetime attending, I was really pleased for him that Reading had their day in the sun.
I guess for him, following Reading has been a bit like me following Charlton, except invariably he's had to do it a division lower than I have, lol
All clubs of our size get fans from bigger clubs, or people that know not a lot about footie, watching them when we're in the Premiership or doing well....including palace.
We know palace try and use the valley express as a way of taking the P about us busing in fans, and to be fair if it was the other way around i'm sure we would use it as an excuse to do the same. But the truth is after the first year of service there were surveys done by the club to find out who was using it and it was found that over 75% (can't remember exact %) of the users were already ST holders, and most of that 75% had been ST holders for 5 years or more.
It's simply a great, cost effective way of travelling to games for fans as well as a good way for the club to get some lapsed fans back and should be offered by more clubs.
But hey....when have fans ever let reality get in the way of trying to take the P? :-)