Suddenly, everything became that little bit clearer when Shaun Harvey, chief executive of the Football League, started talking about “conscious scheduling decisions” and it transpired there was a reason why the people who still like to see their teams in person, the old-fashioned way, often face the most inconvenient journeys at the most inconvenient times.
Until now you, like me,
might have thought it was simply bad luck when the relevant teams were assigned to those long-distance trips on Tuesday and Wednesday nights and their travelling fans were left trying to work out how to get home before birdsong.
It cannot have been easy, for example, for Leeds United’s followers to pack out the away end of Cardiff City’s stadium on a Tuesday night last month bearing in mind the hassles of getting home, the prospect of a four-hour slog each way and the absence of any late trains back (unless they were prepared to leave early to catch the 9.55pm, spend almost five hours on the platform at Crewe, change for a second time at Manchester Piccadilly and eventually arrive in Leeds at 7.47am).
That, however, feels like a breeze compared to some of the other late-night treks the league has thrown up so far this season.
Authentic Benny Cunningham Youth Jersey On the same evening Leeds played in south Wales, how many supporters of Plymouth Argyle had the stomach for a 570-mile round trip to Wigan Athletic? There were 34 in the away end at Brunton Park when Stevenage travelled 540 miles to and from Carlisle that evening.
Yet it is a way of life for many thousands, covering more miles than your average Eddie Stobart truck and finding out the hard way that vast stretches of the M1, the M6 and various other motorways can be coned off on the graveyard shift, often without a single fluorescent jacket in sight.
Already this season there have been plenty of other examples: Norwich at Middlesbrough, Sunderland at Ipswich, Morecambe at Yeovil, Cardiff at Preston,
http://www.losangelesramsauthorizedstore.com/andrew-whitworth-jersey-elite Hull at Fulham, Blackpool at Plymouth, Southend at Shrewsbury. In the coming weeks there will be Doncaster versus Portsmouth, Gillingham against Wigan, Sheffield United at QPR, Rotherham at AFC Wimbledon and Millwall at Sheffield Wednesday. And on and on.
It happens, it is unshakeable and the people who shape their lives around watching their teams need extraordinary levels of commitment. Sometimes you get lucky with the fixtures, sometimes you don’t. But it is a grind and a lot easier, to imagine, to accept the worst inconveniences if it can be blamed on a quirk of the fixture computer.
Except it turns out now that it is not quite as innocent as perhaps we thought. Indeed,
Authentic Andrew Quarless Womens Jersey it transpires it is actually intentional to have it this way if you caught Harvey’s interview with BBC Radio 5 Live and heard his admission that it was all cooked up behind the scenes for the shorter-distance fixtures to be held at weekends and the games with more challenging travel to be packed into midweek slots, without a care in the world apparently for the people it might affect. “It’s a deliberate act,” Harvey said.
Well, at least it is out in the open now. “It’s deliberate in so much as we don’t set out to make a fan’s life more difficult than it has to be,” Harvey continued. “We don’t wake up in the morning and think how can we make the most inconvenient set of fixtures.”
Yet that doesn’t make it feel a great deal better to learn that the Football League is purposefully shaping the fixture list this way,
http://www.officialauthenticlions.com/WOMENS_YOUTH_ANTWIONE_WILLIAMS_JERSEY.html deliberately sending teams from the north down to the south coast, or vice versa, as well as all sorts of other hellish late-night trips.
