Thankfully the club have lifted my ban, I've just been in to sign an ABC contract with Stuart Caley and I'm now ok to get back on the games.
Whilst this has been going on I've been giving even more thought into how football and the Rovers in particular could try and accommodate fans who wish to have differing match day experiences. It's been discussed elsewhere on this thread but since the inception of all seater stadiums, fans like myself, for whom sitting at a game seems alien, have more of less been told you either sit or we don't want you at the ground. This has been slightly relaxed in recent years as fans took it on themselves to largely stand at away matches and most clubs have decided to put railed seating into home areas where people generally stand during the match.
So what can the Rovers do? I came up with a few ideas that are certainly worth a try but I understand that it's a near impossibility to please everyone, but would hope that if it's beneficial to the club, people would be inclined to "bend" a bit.
So, we make the whole lower tear of the Blackburn End the railed safe standing area of the ground. Anyone can buy a ticket in there but with the understanding that it is a standing area and they have no recourse if people are standing in front of them. A bloke can buy his season ticket in there with his 2 lads if he likes, but knowing the specific area ground rules if he does. For the fans who say "I've had a season ticket in the Blackburn end all my life but don't want to stand up", we reopen the BE upper tear and they can be accommodated there with the added incentive that that stand becomes the cheapest in the ground, both for season and match day tickets.
In the terrace days, you would often get terracing directly behind the goal with a seated stand behind it, so why not something similar now? The BE bottom tear holds 4974, is it really too much to ask the club and the fans to have that many seats reserved for people who want to stand and leave them with 17 or 18 THOUSAND other seats in the ground where they can watch sat in peace without the worry of getting into an argument with someone who's blocking their view? People are left in no doubt that if they stand persistently in any other area of the ground (excepting maybe the back rows), they will be warned once and then turfed out and banned if they persist.
By doing this, it would encourage all the fans who want to stand to congregate together in the BE lower and we could maybe get some of that old Ewood atmosphere back without it upsetting too many and I've no doubt it would encourage a few of the stay away fans to come back to the game. I know for a fact there are quite a few that don't bother any more for the pure reason they don't like the lack of atmosphere at the game nowadays, I myself stopped going for a while for this very reason, and any returning fans/revenue can only be good for the club long term.
Whichever, surely some of this is worth trialing, along with countless other ideas I could think of off the top of my head, to try and encourage ALL types of fans to get down to Ewood, enjoy themselves and not have to worry about bumping heads with someone who just has a different way of enjoying the game.
COYB