Originally Posted by
peadar1987
The way I see it, true barstoolers are only those in the first category. "Die hard" Man City fans in it for the glory and the association, however tenuous, with success and glamour. The sort who'd never dream of darkening the turnstile at an LOI ground.
For me, the quality of stadia is a pretty poor excuse anyway.
All a football ground actually needs to be good are enough seats, relatively unobstructed lines of sight, enough clean toilets (okay, the Carlisle is shocking in this respect), reasonable food nearby or in the ground, turnstiles and ticket offices you don't have to queue for an hour to get through, and ideally a roof over enough of the stand for people to shelter when it gets rainy. Many LOI clubs already have most of that, and the ones who have all of it already (Tallaght, Dalyer, the Showgrounds, Turner's Cross, even the Belfield Bowl) are hardly bursting at the seams, in spite of being of just as good a quality as any ground I've been to in England or Scotland, only a bit smaller.
What people mean when they say the grounds aren't good enough is either they live in Drogheda, or that they want a fully-covered, 30,000 seater stadium with big screens, executive suites, fancy advertising everywhere, aeroplane seats in the dugouts, and floodlights stolen from NASA. Things that make little to no practical difference to the average fan's experience of the game they're watching, but things that do add to the glitz and glamour they crave.
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