QuoteDuly noted, Sir.Originally Posted by pete
The appeal of winding up such sensitive souls is losing it's charms!
Cop On (how appropriate name) & patsh - ye need tkae your discussion to PM or elsewhere.
Duly noted, Sir.
The appeal of winding up such sensitive souls is losing it's charms!
That part isn't true. No Irish team won so much as a game in the InterToto before the switch to summer soccer (the last season of winter soccer, Cork lost home and away to a Latvian team). Summer soccer comes along, Pat's beat a Croatian team, Rovers beat a Polish team and Cork beat Swedish and Dutch opposition. Even Bohs' performance this season - winning one match against decent opposition - was better than anything achieved before the switch.
Maybe. To be honest, I think the European results - more so if teams qualify again this season - would go a long way to justifying the switch on their own. Wins in Europe means more money into the league, bigger draws to make the barstoolers sit up (even Hadjuk sold out Tolka and was on TV) and more exposure for the league in general. The teams getting the results are going to benefit most naturally, but I think everyone benefits to a degree.
It does look though as if bugger all research - in particular re crowds - went into the idea. Granted, we don't have previous attendance figures to compare, but crowds seem to be at best the same, the summer months are the worst for crowds and there are plenty of other attractions on.
I don't know that summer soccer's not working though. What would you define as "not working"?
If crowds are down now for some clubs in the summer, sureley it would be much worse in the winter. Ye are telling me the crowds would improve when the weather is getting wetter & the frezzing cold Friday or Saturday night you have to be joking. IMO Summer Soccer all the way.
City Til I Die
Champions 2005
What were the two worst months during the old conventional season times? Would it have been the harshest of the winter?
Surely the clubs who have bars should be promoting games with cheap gargle in their clubhouses and rolling out the drunken plastics into their stands for league games after the WC games finish up?
MFA-Cheers
The only people disappointed in summer football are the ones who thought it would isntantly solve every problem the league had. It hasn't, but in certain areas it has helped a hell of alot. No question whatsoever it has to stay imo. What the others who said it have said is spot on, poor crowds are down to the lack of marketing and image and many things, not what time of the year it is.
Crowds are down. I didn't expect it to solve the problems of the league, I didn't expect it to be fookin worse...
If you attack me with stupidity, I'll be forced to defend myself with sarcasm.
eh, yes we have.... And a dry pitch doesn't necessarily mean a good one....
If you attack me with stupidity, I'll be forced to defend myself with sarcasm.
Some crowds are down. Some crowds are up. Can you say conclusively that any of this is a direct result of Summer football.....?
But if you look at Bohs and Longford specifically there's been no great improvement (just look at the Estonian results for Bohs):
Bohs Results
2000-2001 UEFA Prel Aberdeen (Sco) A 0-1 2-1
2000-2001 UEFA 1st Kaiserslautern (Ger) H 1-3 1-0
2001-2002 ECC Qual-1 Levadia Maardu (Est) H 3-0 0-0
2001-2002 ECC Qual-2 Halmstads BK (Swe) H 1-2 0-2
2003-2004 ECC Qual-1 Bate Borisov (Bls) A 3-0 0-1
2003-2004 ECC Qual-2 Rosenborg (Nor) H 0-1 0-4
2004-2005 UEFA Qual-1 Levadia Tallinn (Est) A 1-3 0-0
Longford Results
2001-2002 UEFA Prel Litex Lovech (Bul) H 1-1 0-2
2004-2005 UEFA Prel FC Vaduz (Lie) A 2-3 0-1
I'll give you that InterToto results have improved but what has been the impact of that - no improved ranking and little public interest outside the clubs involved. The Europe thing is what SS will live or die on (as the topic suggests!) and I think the jury is still out. Considering the higher standard of players and training, you would expect our results to be better than at any other time during the past 30 years. If the standard continues to rise to the point where group qualification is a reasonable expectation, does anyone think it could be a short-sighted view - setting up your entire season around the preliminary rounds of the competitons?
I was against the season change from the start and kind of expected things to turn out as they have, given the lack of research/planning. Soccer has traditionally been an Autumn, Winter, Spring sport except where climate dictates otherwise. As much as we moan, the Irish winter does not generally prohibit the playing of outdoor field sports! I would have taken a (lengthy?) winter break as a better experiment than diving into the present situation. I can understand the benefits of avoiding the Carlisle grounds during a cold snap and instead using the trip to take in the seaside during the height of summer (although the fixture list sees Pats travelling there in March and September) but I believe that if the product is good enough (including marketing) people would come out for an August-May season.
As it is we've yielded a good portion of the year to rugby, with no other popular sports available to spectators within Ireland for a number of months. As we all know, people have other things to do during the summer - winter is boring, how long was the last close season!?
Where we go again - we made one change and the whole world hasn't started spinning the other way within three years, so we'd better change back to the way things were. What is it with people running football? Why must all proposed changes last no longer than three or four years before reverting back to the way it was, unless there is a momentuous change? It takes three to four years for folk to get used to a system, never mind for it to work. It's the ten team league all over again - two years in, someone starts crying that they don't like it, and everything shunts back to the way things were without a murmur.
Personally speaking, I think that the ten team league combined with Summer Soccer[SIZE=1]tm[/SIZE] was starting to yield results (noting that one, if not both, would not necessarily suit the Blues). And I mean starting only - if you want to look next door, you'll notice that the introduction of the Premiership concept took around six years to have a direct impact in European competition, and at International level, introducing three points for a win took about four to six years before there was a consistent improvement in the quality of football.
It would be a step backwards to revert within the next three years - six to ten years should demonstrate whether or not it has worked (as would have been the case with the ten team league
That question was less stupid, though you asked it in a profoundly stupid way.
Help me, Arthur Murphy, you're my only hope!
God, I'd forgotten that!
All-time InterToto results -
1995 - Bohs lost four from four to Bordeaux, Odense, Helsinki and Norrkoping
1996 - Sligo drew two (to Nantes and Heerenveen) and lost two (to Inkranes, now Kaunas, and Lillestrom)
1997 - Cork drew with Aarau, Liege and Maccabi Petach, and lost to Koln (though without scoring a single goal)
1998 - Rovers lost to Altay aet
1999 - Shels drew and lost to Xamax
2000 - UCD drew with Kyustendil twice
2001 - Cork lost to Metalurgs twice
2002 - 2005 - as noted above.
So I'm not gone that senile yet...!
Ambitionless, boring, defensive football?
We're not arrogant, we're just better.
I think it's a bit soon for saying that. Bohs were in turmoil last season - the Estonian result saw Kenny sacked, so at least expectations are up. The first year in Europe was a disaster, granted - Rovers and First Division Dundalk both got hammered, Shels lost to a Maltese team. Last year showed the potential of summer soccer. This year, I would hope, will see us build on that now that Shels and Cork have set the benchmark.
That said, there is something not right about matches in glorious sunshine as opposed to the dark. Maybe starting the season in June and running through to March could have been an alternative? Best of both worlds (Europe is in-season, and you still avoid the summer)?
This isn't meant to be a dig at Longford but I think eL results in Europe have usually been let down by the FAI Cup winning team in the Uefa Cup.
We need teams 1,2,3 from the league to be qualifying each year. Bohs was a shock losing to Estonians but experienced European teams usually do better each year.
True (Dundalk and Bray spring to mind as well), but in fairness, it's the same for every country, so it hardly puts us at a disadvantage. In fact, we're benefitting this year by playing the sixth team in Wales (Carmarthen), who qualifed as Cup runners-up.
Are they? They don't seem to be imo, for a start only now are we getting an accurate picture of crowds anyway and it looks to me like some teams are up and others are down, which is what you would expect at any stage. I really doubt that the prospect of watching matches in sunshine is putting people off going.
And the improvements in results in Europe, how can anyone even begin to dispute this? Before last season an Irish team had only won two ties in Europe in one go once. Once ever in the history of the league. Last year we had twice in one year for christ sake! It's a huge improvement.
Also it seems to suit Setanta to show matches during the summer, so we're pratically at a live game every week on there atm. You could argue that's not all down to summer football, but I'd imagine every season the majority of there games will come between july and august. It has definitely helped.
Not wanting to pick holes in your argument, but people travel abroad for, on average, 2 weeks, some maybe three. So maybe they don't make one home game or at worst 2. Or maybe all the Bohs supporters travel away together from June to Sept, I don't know. Probably visiting the Shels fans who seem to be permanently away
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