Thetownend.com

How many of you guys would be in favour of a safe standing area for the county ground ? . I personally would love it !! . I can remember way back in the mid 80 s when i was a young teen , (showing my age here !!!!) , going into the town end , against my parents wishes ! , and loving the atmoshere , jumping around and flowing back n forth ! , dont get any of that anymore since going all seater. I think they should return the town end to a safely controlled safe standing terrace , think it would do wonders for the atmoshere . I thought all clubs had to be all seater by the late 90 s or something like that , swindon even had to rapidly seat the stratton bank as it was nearly the deadline but still there are handfulls of clubs still with terracing !!!!! , baffles me ! , carlisle , brentford , rovers , cheltenham , lincoln , chesterfield , scunthorpe , and peterboro , to name a few , all have been allowed to keep terracing at their grounds .Not 100% but i think bradford city are looking into having a safe standing area at their ground if they are allowed . Think its a great idea . Still dont know why we had to rapidly convert our terraces to seats when grounds up and down the country still have em . Favouritism is wot i say !!!!

Doesn't everyone stand in the town end anyway?

We had to convert as teams in the top two leagues (as we were then) had to go all seater within 3 years i believe, whereas the lower league clubs didn't.

I would love to see some "safe standing" return, but personally don't believe it will ever happen.

We had to change it to seating as we were a prem club at the time....i think the Town End would be great standing...no one got hurt there when 26000 and 31000 thousand packed into the ground...only danger with terracing is if its fenced in obviously,but it aint going to happen and if we hadnt got promoted to the prem we would probably still have some terracing at the County Ground.

now now leefer we only have 15000 fans or so in there at any one time...

Mr Fitton said so yesterday! ;)

The top 2 divisions require all seater (the original deadline was 3 years for clubs at the date it came in, but I think it's less now if you get promoted).  I think you can build new terracing but the club won't get any grant money towards development so the cost is quite big with no financial gain to be had off the back of it.  The FLA are the sticking point, refusing to consider a review of the policy that all seater is the only form possible for football.  They license the stadiums for use and accept that for all other types of entertainment at a ground, people can even stand in a seated area for the full duration.  They believe that it is not safe to do so for football, hence all the hassle from stewards in the past.  It does seem to be far less enforced recently, so not sure if someone has relaxed the guidelines.

Why not just rip the seats out of the town end and stick them in a shed somewhere. Then if/when we get promoted we can put them back again.

Or is it not that simple?

Do Posh have to put seats in now they are in the Championship?

Bring it back......the Town end has never been the same.

Lets go fucking mental!!!  La La La La!

I'm probably one of the few people that is against the return to standing sections. I don't think it adds anything to the atmosphere and its a pain having to stand for so long at a game, especially when you're watching shit football week in week out (ie Swindon Town).

But even the most ardent fans of safe standing would only turn the TE into terracing, you could still sit in the Don Rogers or Arkells stands, it just gives fans the choice.

I dont think anyone is talking about making entire grounds safe standing. Its about the entirely reasonable request that some fans want to watch matches in a different way to others. Ie cater for your customers.

Our crowds were better with terracing. I still think most Swindon fans are more at home on a terrace (but roughly a 50-50 home split). Its much easier to endure shit football on a terrace because the crowd find other ways to amuse themselves. In seats fans just sit silent in morose thinking ever more about how crap the team is.

I didnt think anyone in the UK actually doubted that terracing produces better atmosphere in games. But you do. Staggered.

I didn't go to P'boro, but I did go to Aldershot in the cup and what I found was that when we weren't playing well it was nice to wander down to the front and have a bit of a blow out.

And we ended up winning so make of that what you will.

i used to think a return to terracing shouldn't happen,but have changed my mind.as long as it's not the old style terracing, and is done like it is in germany, then i'm for it.

I don't see anything wrong with a terraced area being allocated to modern stadia. If we ever redeveloped the County Ground it would interesting to see if they would consider such a thing.

I sit in the DRS but would like to see the Town End return to terracing purely so there is an alternative to sitting.
There are a few things that I don't like about sitting at football......

1. It's difficult to relocate to a different part of the stand during a match
2. I have a season ticket and the guy (also ST holder) who sits in front of me is quite animated and tends to throw his head back quite often during a game (occasionally connecting with my knee  :D)
3. I've been to many games in the past where a disinterested child has sat behind me and started playing football with the back of my seat  >:(. My season ticket is in the back row, and always will be  :nod:
4. We had a lot of very cold evening games this season and cold seats are bad!
5. Atmosphere! It's gotta be better on terracing.

I enjoyed being back on terracing at Peterborough on saturday, and want to stand sometime again next season.

I would love a standing area, and there is nor good argument against it. But I can't see it happening because there are no benefits to those who could give it the go ahead.

Admit it, you're just trolling really aren't you?

No, dont think so.

See the other thread about Southampton. The old way with football was always that crowds could influence games. Seems quite obvious to me that the close atmosphere at the Dell helped Southampton survive many top flight relegation scraps.

I put that equally down to Le Tissier to be honest Spencer White.

He is one of my favourite English footballers of all time.

And mine.

I wish there were many more ugly but brilliant footballers today! Then people would have to be interested in what they really are - footballers. Not some quasi celebrity arrogant twat.

Le Tissier isn't English, he wouldn't pass the Ironside test.

From the channel Islands....proud to be not english........until the fucking Gestapo turned up.....then they all waved the union jacks!!

Sark is a part of Guernsey - me and my old flatmates considered spending a year in Sark and playing for their "national team", they need all the help they can get!

...but then we either changed the conversation/sobered up/or watched Red Dwarf in a small, cloudy bedroom at 4am.

Good times.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sark_national_football_team

Oh, and bring back terracing!

And this would be the official point of thread derailment..........

 More accurately part of the Bailiwick of Guernsey.

Casey Jones......slam the anchors on!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yeah, but I only knew this because of wikipedia - so I went with 'part' instead, the common mans 'Bailiwick' :)

And to be fair there isnt a lot of point debating safe standing.

Powers that be have made it quite clear that they are not listening or interested.

Ive always said that the only way it will come back is if chairman think they can make money out of it. Whilst attendances are still high they will not listen. I could see it happening though, clubs at the moment concentrate all out on the whole 'fammily club' thing, because that is what has fuelled their boom. But one day I think they will be looking at ways to bring a bit of excitement back into the stands. Its all about £££££.

Good point Spencer.

To be quite frank, until the likes of Phil Gartside are asking for it then it is a total non-event.

The powers that be are not interested in what Swindon, Southend or Bristol Rovers are asking for in new stadia.

Didn't Yeovil once construct a stand that was standing but designed to make it easier for seating to be put in if need be?

the standing issue is deffo a debateable subject.i doubt you'd get many liverpool fans keen on it.

I remmember the news after the last game that the Kop was standing.

There was loads of 'No seats' graffiti on the Kop. Fans there were devastated.

That was a full 5 years after Hillsborough.

I just wanted a chance to use the word Bailiwick....what's the point in knowing stuff, if you can't use it from time to time.

A fair point Smeeton.

Yep - it wasn't terracing that caused Hillsborough. That was just the excuse, and everybody knows it. I love the fact we're able to stand up in the Town End, and much prefer being able to stand when I go to an away game. It's just not the same sat down, although I definitely agree you do need to have seats for people who want/need them

well during the service last month at anfield, a speaker was openly stating that terracing shouldn't return.

Not at all - I'm not convinced terracing adds that much to the atmosphere. One thing that is for certain is that the lack of it doesn't present a good atmosphere - I doubt many people would say you don't have a decent atmosphere at Anfield, Old Trafford or Wembley. Though it being brought back won't bother me much as I'll just stay in the seats.

I do get extremely pissed with people that insist on standing in seated sections though. My dad can't stand for an entire match so when we get stuck in a stand with a bunch of self centred, brain dead morons who insist on standing it is fucking annoying and means he either can't watch all the game or has to endure the pain.

I pefer to stand at away games I think most people do....but when we do we stand at the back so if people want to sit we arent getting in there way....

no harm done then

I've only been watching football for a few seasons and I have to say that I find it unnatural to sit down at a match. The TE is where I have to be - stood up - the better view from the Arkells or DRS is irrelevant to me. I have tried it and it just felt so wrong. You can't fucking sing sat down.

That Posh stand on Saturday was sublime and what I would like at the County Ground.

So as Spencer said, it should be about catering for your paying customers wants and I reckon it would be an earner for people like myself.

(NB I obviously haven't been around for long enough to have experienced pre-Hillsborough terracing and so I don't have an opinion on what it used to be like)

Yes I heard that and it annoyed me a little bit.

No one is talking about returning to the kind of Terrace we had before Hillsborough that felt almost alive and pushed and swayed with every attack.When you think back to those times its amazing that more people werent hurt.I remember launching my kid brother who would have been 8ish into the air and him almost crowd surfing and loving it.

Safe standing isnt a return to terracing,its more designed seating areas but without the actual seat.They have it in Germany and whilst I will always feel nothing but sympathy for all the Hillsborough Groups I dont think they they are able to look at the issue subjectivly.

True Safe Standing is not used in this country, and I really do have doubts about peoples likely love affair with it because it will not be the old style terracing that people really are thinking about.  As Spencer mentions, only economics will drive a change so it may begin from the lower leagues back up should Chairman panic over falling attendances.  It's probably something that would happen club by club rather than en masse, but I can't see it happening for years - a couple of clubs have paid lip service to having safe standing recently when discussing future ground developments but I see that as little more than pandering to vociferous fans at those clubs.

I fell in love with the Moyes End. Is that old style then? How would Safe Standing be different? And how would that compare to standing in the TE with the seats in place (which is fine IMHO)?

Have a look at this (pictures of safe seating towards the bottom): http://www.users.bigpond.com/pengweeds/presentation.html

Do people really think it would improve attendances? I can't see it myself as standing tickets would have to be priced pretty much the same as seating tickets - capacity is unlikely to be increased much by safe seating, most likely it will stay exactly the same. So why would a club make it cheaper?

I think the chances of terraces returning in the form they used to be in England are a big fat zero. None of the authorities involved would go anywhere near that with someone else's barge pole.

For all the talk of "the bad old days" of terribly unsafe standing crowds at football, I'd challenge anyone to find any examples of deaths occuring as a direct result of those bad old terraces.

Of the major disasters in football, from the Ibrox disaster in 1901 (or 1902 I can't remember) through the second Ibrox disaster in the 70's, Bradford, Heysel and Hillsborough, there's two common themes,

• poorly maintained stadia with piss-poor safety procedures; and

• treating fans like animals to be herded and penned up and having no clear strategies for crowd control

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How exactly would seats have prevented any of these:

Ibrox 1 :Part of an old wodden stand collapses and 50 odd peope fall to their deaths

Ibrox 2 : A safety rail collapses on an exit stair people fall and in the resulting crush something like 60 people are killed

Bradford : A wooden stand full rubbish with no fire exinguishers and the fire exits padlocked, catches fire from a fag end and about 60 are killed

Heysel : Holliganism, complacent policing and stewarding and a shitty old ground not fit to host a BSP league fixture combine and a wall collapses crushing hundreds and killing about 40

Hillsborough:  Exit gates are opened to allow a press of crowd big enough to fill an entire end to flood into a ground all at once and as a result of poor stadium design, they all  flow through a tunnel and into only the central third of the terrace, which is fenced in with 8 ft high fences with only two or three small gates which are locked.


Obviously the answer is that the idea of all seater stadia had fuck all to do with Hillsborough, (contrary to popular belief the Taylor reoport does NOT call for them at all), and much more to do with whcat sociologists like to call the "spectacularisation" of football; that is the process of changing football crowds from more active participants in the  game into nice well behaved spectators who sit quietly and applaud politely. It was about breaking up a football crowd to stop them from being a big collective mass and turn them back into a collection of individuals. Which is a shame becasue that collective feeling was kind of what made it fun in the first place. If it was just about watching the game you'd stay at home and get a Skysport subscription and watch people who could olay it a bit better.

I guess it had both ideological and commercial motivations. Of course it's made it almost impossible to maintain the sort of atmosphere that used to be generated by football crowds. In the past the people that liked singing used to gather towards the back to the left of the goal in one end, now they've all had to buy tickets for an individually numbered seat in groups of two, three or four scattered all over the stand. That's why the atmosphere in away ends is always so much better. A bigger critical mass of signing chanting fans with less choice of where to be.

The Football Supporter's Federation (FSF) have a campaign to bring back Safe Standing, similar to what they have in Germany, and they have produced a report also.

http://www.fsf.org.uk/campaigns/safestanding.php

Personally I'm quite happy sitting down, but if people want to stand...that is fine by me. I cannot see why football fans are being prejudiced as they have to sit down in top flight matches, but if you want to watch rugby, you can stand up, like they do at Gloucester.

I wouldn't disagree with the other disasters having nothing to do with terracing / seating, but then I don't think anyone has ever said they did (plus I'm pretty certain the Bradford stand was seating). But you're living on another planet if you don't think terracing played a major role in the Heysel and Hillsborough disasters, there might of still been trouble but I doubt there would have been any deaths.

Then you are quite clearly the ones who have most to loose from them not introducing standing areas.

If you look at the Kop during any match at Anfield you will see several thousand Liverpool fans who are keen on standing. Just like every other ground, people are continuing to stand up even though they are not supposed to.

The Hillsborough families are opposed to a return of standing, it was their spokesman Trevor Hicks and his speech at the recent service at Anfield which was referred to elsewhere in this thread. This is perfectly understandable given their appalling loss, but it doesnt make them right.

We actually do have safe standing in this country already. At least, we are allowed to stand at places like Peterborough, Yeovil, and Hereford. If its not safe, why would it still be allowed, and if it is safe on that scale at Yeovil, why wouldnt a similar amount of standing be safe anywhere else?

Having said that, I saw Simon Inglis (stadium expert) interviewed recently and he made a good point about the need in 1989 for a complete shift away from standing to force English Football to clean up its act. A move to improve standing areas, as had been done many times before, would not have given English Football the boot up the arse it needed at that time.

It does worry me though that there still seems to be a reluctance from the authorities to accept the facts of fan behaviour and deal with them. In 1989 they knew people would arrive late, and some would chance their arm without tickets but took the view that those people shouldnt do that, rather than accepting it as inevitable and dealing with it.

Now we have people standing in seated areas, which must be less safe than standing in areas which have been designed for that purpose. Rather than just tut-tut and say people should sit down, it would be better to accept that some people prefer to stand up and make provision for tham to do so safely. Then the people who prefer to sit, but have to stand up because the fans in front of them are stood up can have their preference too. Afterall, nobody stood up in seated areas when there were standing areas available.

Especially when all the top clubs stand at every away game.

So its right in their faces all the time.

The Taylor report doesn't suggest that standing is unsafe per se, just that seating is the easiest way to counter the problems found within the final report. But when you look at what the report sets out to address, I'm not convinced that seating counters these issues. Hooligansim can still be an issue in seated areas for example (Rovers at home anyone?!).

I'd like to see a choice but the return to old style terracing just isn't going to happen. Safe standing is really only an issue for newer/larger stadia because in smaller stands like the town end you can pretty much stand anyway. In effect, the town end setup (with seats) almost mirrors the designated places idea of safe standing, except it can be a bit of a  pain to stand with the seats there. But this is why we should be concerned, the spread of fans has caused a loss of atmosphere at the County Ground (I happen to think this isn't the sole or main reason but I am sure it is a factor) and a larger bowl-like stadium will only amplify (sic) the problem.

Would safe standing in this example improve atmosphere? I think so but this is only a personal opinion. The people who want to make noise would more likely select the choice to go in those areas and thus bunch them up and make creating atmosphere an easier task. As mentioned previously, away games are generally noisier because everyone is closer together.

Would 'safe standing' be to the detriment of safety? Would it increase the following?:

* Crowd congestion - No, there will be a number of designated places to stand which will not exceed the number of tickets.
* Hooliganism - If fans were segregated in the same way they are now, then no. Fans often rush over to the opposition fans for a bit of banter in seated areas anyway.
* Aggressive crowd movement - No, if you look at the German examples there isn't much opportunity to sway around and push etc.

Can't see why it isn't allowed.

Oh and read up about the Ellis Park disaster if you think seating solves all the problems.

It doesn't solve all the problems. But if Ellis Park had terracing and the number of fans involved in the disaster had surged in to it, how many would have died? It would have been a lot more than 43.

How did you come to the conclusion that safe standing terracing would have led more people to die?

I didn't, I was comparing seating to terracing. I'd agree that safe standing would have resulted in less deaths, most likely a lot less deaths than actually happened - the extra barrier along the seats make it a lot safer than standard seating. Calling it "safe standing terracing" is a bit misleading, its just seats with extra barriers to make standing safer.

Maybe or maybe not. The disaster was caused by too many fans and unallocated tickets (amongst other things). Hard to say whether old style terracing would have been worse.

This thread is about safe standing though, I think we all realise the return to old style terracing would never happen.

Yeah I've lived on the planet that's seen a group of hooligans attack opposition fans across a seated area of a stadium and the fucking chaos and panic that causes. Stick seats into Heysel and change nothing else, don't fix the crumbing infrastructure to stop concrete walls toppling over when pushed against, don't adequately police, steward and segregate and that disaster might have been even worse.

As for Hillsborough I have no idea what planet YOU live on. The one thing that seats do provide in terms of crowd safety is a de facto means of controlling the capacity of an area of the ground. Your seat numbers in the central area of the Leppings Lane end then you go into the cen tral area, it's in the left hand side area, then you go there. HOWEVER, if 5 minutes before kickoff the coppers panic and throw open the fucking gates and allow anyone to flood into the ground whether they've got a ticket for that area or not, and you build the groupnd in such a way that in a crowd inertia carrys virtually everyone in to the central area of the end, leaving the wings half empty, then having fucking seats in there is a complete fucking irrelevance. What exactly do you do when you come through a tunnel out into the stand and find all the seats seem to be full? Turn around? Oh shit there appear to be four thousand people pushing me forward into the stand anyway! At best you just move the crush back into the tunnel, at worst you have the same crush in the stand with the added bonus of seats for peopple to fall over and get trampled. (Si's right the Ellis Park disaster shows exactly what would happen in a seated area if you change nothing else but add seats.)

Ahounsells right when he quotes Simon Inglis. The reason stadia are safer now is much less because of the introductioin of seating, and much more to do with the investment in the basic strucure of the stadia that the Taylor report has required.

Stick a cage around the Leppings Lane end now and cram 1000 more people than belong in it through the entrance and seats or no fucking seats a shit load of people will die.

Good post lumps.

Its been quite a while since I've seen someone talk the level of shit that Johny72 has managed in this thread.