I was fairly young when all seater stadiums rolled out and I was absolutely delighted standing was ended. It used to be awful at times in the east stand, and when I state “at times” I mean the “bigger” games. It was fine when 17,000 were rolling in for a nothing game on a drab Wednesday night....
But, at those bigger matches the turnstile staff would only stop letting people in when they realised it was time to clock off, £10 got you in no matter what the capacity might or might not have been, there was no regard for the safety of the fans. We were cattle and many fans were happy to play the BSE cow role and they kept em coming.
You would need the good luck of a lottery winner to be standing in the same spot for 90 minutes, or at a barrier point or the end of Aisle, Christ if you got the end of the Aisle for a while game..... It was the law of the jungle back then, faced on a regular basis with bigger, meaner or more pissed than you people, move over you did!
The only thing close to that I have encountered under all seating arrangements is when we had the WHL finale last year and all kinds of absolute tossers found their way into block 31 - clearly without tickets (( That’s a disgrace by the way and something the Club did not do enough to apologise for - those that bunked in were not “fans” and i’ll never forget that dozey scouse lass standing behind us chearfully informing people she had never been to a football game before and got in for a bung on the turnstile or the hygienically challenged prick who stood in front on me in the same Row - pissed of course ))
Back in the “good old days” the drunks were awful (( all drunks are annoying unless you too are drunk)) people would literally piss on others rather than go out to the toilet, the rucks and shoving was always going on and essentially Human decency was a highly questionable concept, honestly it makes me cringe how bad it could be and most of it was driven by poor stadium management, there were simply too many people in sections and no way to verify who should be there and who should be elsewhere. Under Seating conditions you seldom have those problems.
To suggest now that we fans were all hugging each other while singing the Sideboard Song is to ignore the truth. It was unsafe on too many occasions and there is a lot of historic examples of crowd problems that have simply not been as replicated under seating conditions (although I have still seen pockets of ridiculous behaviour at various stadiums including our own)
I feel that any reversion to standing would need to find a way ensure that stewards could keep areas from being overloaded, then it has a potential to be controlled and then be “safe” but how can it be done if it’s not managed and what club will really want £8.75 an hour staff managing the issue?
I feel with a seat you are either in it or not ( in theory at least as let’s be honest we have all had the pissed Cunt on a child’s ticket bundle into our rows to “stand with me mates” despite paying 50% less than we have) the seats create the natural boundary, that’s important with huge groups of people, no seat, no boundary = problems.
So for me, drop the romantic point of view from the debate and focus on the real challenges of crowd management under standing conditions I remain completely against the “safe standing” concept as I do not believe it would be safe, but if there is a way, let’s all hear it.
Now one other and complex thing to consider is have we, as a society, moved on from loutish behaviour at football? Are the current / next generation simply more likely to have a smoothy than 6 pints of Stella and some rancid Chic King in a grease soaked box ? And could thus self govern the areas of standing ? I am not seeing it yet, although I feel cynical in saying that. Apologies if I am.
