This week's trip down Vicarage Road memory lane remembers when attendances were actual attendances WatfordFC
The Watford Observer has once again teamed with its friends at the Watford Treasury to share stories from previous issues of YBR! - Yellow Black & Red!As the teams came out onto the brightly illuminated pitch, I scanned across the stands. The away end was quite well populated for a night game with the TV cameras in attendance, the Ann Stand had far more empty seats than eager kids, whilst the SEJ was a patchwork, around 50/50, of human forms and plastic voids.
Attendances used to matter. They mattered a lot. I recall it was almost an unofficial sport on the terraces, guess the crowd before Adam Cummings would come over the tannoy, around two-thirds of the way into the second half, and announce the magical figure. I would be able to get it within 300 or so almost every game. I got good at it. Like reading the Matrix I could eliminate the always-sparsely populated sections of the ground, and not be swayed by the overly crowded areas behind the goals.
If it was a large gate Adam’s “And today’s attendance is 17,135. Ladies and gentlemen thank you all for coming…” would be greeted with a hearty cheer, perhaps followed by the scoreboard bursting into ‘Loyal Supporters , Loyal Supporters ’. On the other hand, if it was “And today’s attendance is 6,101…” then it would be the away fans cheering and jeering.
Now they are meaningless. A 20,000 crowd – as persistently recorded, but seldom achieved, during the ‘Premier Days’ – is as reliable a figure as 30, 40 or 50 thousand. It means nothing. Like transfer fees and debt calculations, they’re just figures implanted in records purely for the sake of presenting a figure. Those empty seats, and there are often a lot of them, don’t lie. The figures given do. Let’s get back to recording actual numbers, this is fooling no one.
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