Thought as a casual I should perhaps chuck my tuppence ha'penny into the Wrath's ring...

-piece.
You know, because not enough has been said about the whole debacle over the last couple of days...

But also, as it's perhaps been perceived as an upheaval designed - on the face of it - to favour the likes of myself, so maybe how I've interpreted it and it's likely effect on my match going efforts would be vaguely interesting.

I can already tell I'm going to waffle on into the night and this is gonna fall all too quickly into TL;DR territory...

Firstly, a bit of perspective of who I am and have been as a fan:-

1996/97 - 2000/01
Casual during years when getting a ticket was never an issue - or ridiculously expensive - plus I could still get away with youth discounts, just about

2001/02
Member - back when there was only one (cheap) type (I think only a tenner), a great season drew me into attending more regularly and those early years of posting on the Wrath helped me feel more connected

2002/03 - 2008/09
Home STH

including 2004/05
also Away STH (pretty sure it was twenty quid but with a tenner discount on some condition of multiple purchases; I have ticket stubs for both £20 & £10), when I correctly predicted that we were only likely to taste a single season of Prem footy, so grab as many away grounds in as you can, whilst you can (being a ground-hunter type of fan); I could also afford to be going to all the homes and aways for once, plus this was a period when I'd switched playing footy for watching it and had the beer belly to show for it

2009/10
Away STH (still just twenty) - for a number of personal reasons I'd had to ditch my Home ST, but with us dropping to League One I couldn't resist a whole glut of new grounds (or stomach the idea of going completely cold turkey)

2010/11 - 2014/15
Casual but beneficiary of spare family Home ST, typically a small handful of midweeks due to travel/work issues for family member living in the sticks

2015/16 - 2017/18
"Priority" Member - PM had initially been bought to aid purchase of Wembley tickets at the end of 14/15 (as on my customer number nothing had been bought for all those years of benefitting from a spare ST, so I was in a lower priority group to my partner, with the other ST being used by family); that pair of STs had been given up for family reasons and replaced by 3 PMs but over these years casual prices kept rising (paid fifty at one point!) and you were always scrapping online for obscured view single seats tucked in the corner infills

2018/19
Casual - ditched the PMs and focussed on completing our 92 as neutral groundhopping football tourists with 10 non-Norwich aways; that said, we still clocked a single Norwich away game (thanks to Wrath help on my return here due to panic it'd sell out, though in the end it did go to general sale) plus five league games and a cup game at home

So I've tasted life from all sides of the ticketing spectrum, from successful to unsuccessful ballots for Portaloo (thankfully missing out on them beating us as we headed out of the league in the wrong direction), from the days of the hallowed "Ten Stubs Club", collecting actual ticket stubs and getting them marked at the ticket office to sort out your following seasons travels, to bemoaning Home STHs getting a thousand point head start on me (when I never benefitted from this during my STH days).

That itself would've been a welcome tweek rather than this wholesale sea-change. I feel sorry for Away STHs, that I assume after this season will be chucked into the same lottery as the rest once their ring fencing is removed. Having it all done automatically was part of the benefits too, so they certainly have my sympathies for the added hassle they'll now face this season. The cynic in me agrees that the ring fencing was a fire fighting move to placate the chosen seven (two of which I've read from on Twitter the other night) and those they most represented. The cynic in me also has sympathies for those that felt forced in a maddened panic of confusion, rage, betrayal and FOMO to stump up the lottery tax, with the timing of the announcement then swift release of sale, followed by the in-house distraction doc that I refuse to watch and be placated by neatly in time for the fixture release to make it all literally yesterday's news. Out of principle we won't be paying two hundred quid lottery tax. We'll instead take our chances on general sale and retain our rights to casual freedom of choice without caveats; £30 is welcome for homes, though the chances of getting anything with ~1,500 available and thousands of tax payers ahead of us are obviously slim to none (though perhaps improving once back in the Champ). As for aways, as ground-hunters, we obviously only have eyes for the new White Hart Lane, though so will every other Tom, Dick and Harry at every other club, never mind just ours. Then the fixture computer chucked it on a school night anyway, as one of only two term-time midweeks (as it stands), so we'll have to wait on that one. Salford City is our main away aim, to rejoin the 92 Club plus we want to venture into more women's football grounds. Doubling up the memberships required felt like a real f**k-you move and a better system could've involved accruing points for both homes and aways as a casual, that way you could clock up the required visits from a combination. There seems to be next to no point in the lower priced tax rate, especially if numbers in the group above it are so high. I can understand as a former STH about the importance of price-per-game but Home STHs will have to console themselves that they do at least have their seat guaranteed for every match and haven't got a mad scrap on their hands every fortnight.

So as Anita Byrne herself stated on Twitter ( User Posted Link one of the hallowed Secret Seven alongside 'Keith A' User Posted Link ), it won't be worth the tax for me if we only end up doing a couple of homes and aways, which is all we'd likely get the chance of anyway. Which is I suppose what they were trying to avoid to put off all those Yarmouth Reds. I'm the most casual of casual and that comes at a cost. A cost of little to no Norwich games at least for this season. I'm sure I had more salient points to make on this but it's fast approaching four in the morning, plus from the percentage of Wrathing I've already trawled through over the last couple of days, people have already covered most of these points. Nobody's gonna bother with all my guff on top, especially not with their cornflakes before work. Fuck it, spot of Matt Jones checking out this weekend's Crankworx Innsbruck Slopestyle course for ten minutes of dirt jump bike heaven before bed...
User Posted Link

Posted By: DJ Ginga on June 14th 2019 at 04:00:09

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