It's just a vain attempt to keep up with yee West Brits.......Originally Posted by passerrby
"Take it down from the mast,..."
games against harps are da only thing we have remotely resembling a derby so i'd be gutted if they went t*ts up. was ragin that they got relegated when we got promoted.i hope they get everything sorted but can we have chris breen now plz. seems like harps have been incredibly unlucky with injuries this season. if breen, funston, gethins, gorman and to lesser extent o'donnell were fit all season harps definitely wouldn't be far off the top of the graveyard
"Even if the sun ceases to rise, Even if the sea ceases to flow, Even if the wind stops to blow, The name of Sligo Rovers will shine and shine forever like the morning, glinting star in the sky."
Sorry to see Harps in bother. Always have been, and always will be, my second team.
Though i am disappointed that the statement seems to place a lot of the blame for Harp's plight upon Summer soccer. Seems that any club who is struggling at the turnstiles has a handy external excuse to trot out to explain away their situation.
Would it not be closer to the truth to look almost entirely to that time-proven sporting correlation between on the pitch performance and attendances instead....??
Did Winter soccer fail the likes of Drogheda, Sligo and Limerick in years gone by ? Or do their increased attendances these days have more to do with their improved standings than on the time of year ? Hmmm - I wonder......
Firstly - if as you say Summer football is failing for "the vast majority of teams" - name them. I wouldn't consider anything less than 75-80% to be 'the vast majority' - i.e. 17-18 teams. So who are all these teams for whopm Sumemr football has been clearly such a mitigated disaster that fans of other club sknow all about it ?
Secondly - how can anyone seriously pin 100% of the blame for their club's attendances upon Summer football ? The simple answer is that you cannot. Particularly in the case of teams like Sligo, Drogheda and Limerick who have much higher crowds now than they did when playing Winter football. I like the way it's Summer football that's to blame for a drop in Sligo's crowds this year versus last, whilst the blame for your poor crowds back in the days of Winter football was anything but the season. Again - sounds like the classic easy option of blaming Summer football for any ills one wants, without having anything at all to substantiate the claim.
Back when we had Winter football for 8 decades, crowds fluctuated from season-to-season and from period-to-period for a whole host of reasons - often in complete contrast to a team's performance. So what was blamed then ? Nowadays if you even lose one fan then it's all 'Oh - look at what Summer football's doing....'
There is simply no conclusive proof of the impact of Summer football upon attendances either way. It is too early to draw conclusions, and the data to hand is nowhere near robust enough for lay-people like ourselves to draw definitive league-wide conclusions anyway. I wish people would stop kidding themselves about this.
We are light years ahead of the Welsh league on every possible count - there can be no debate about that. We have better facilities, a markedly higher standard of football, greater success in European competitions, more full-time players/teams, and much much higher attendances. For example, the highest attendance they had last year for any league game was 823. Ours was 9,000. They also had their 2nd year-on-year drop in overall average attendances - is that therefore conclusive proof that Winter football is failing the Welsh clubs....?
Given that a number of our improvements above (particularly re stadiums, professionalism, attendaces at a number of clubs, and Euro results) are improvements that have occured in recent years, in reality the gap between ourselves and the Welsh league has actually been expanding recently. Any surprise therefore that they've considered following our example of Summer football... ?
I disagree, I dont think summer football has changed anything for any first division club.
Which clearly indicates support has bottomed out and cannot sink any further!
Steve the statement mentions on the field performance first and then mentions the other factors as exacerbating the situation. This isn't putting most of the blame on summer football- it's putting most of it on the team's performance and mentioning other factors that are hurting us too- and Summer football, in our case at least, has certainly hit crowds.Though i am disappointed that the statement seems to place a lot of the blame for Harp's plight upon Summer soccer. Seems that any club who is struggling at the turnstiles has a handy external excuse to trot out to explain away their situation.
Would it not be closer to the truth to look almost entirely to that time-proven sporting correlation between on the pitch performance and attendances instead....??
Admit it - you were drinking and hard driving when you wrote that!
I'd rather die laughing than trying!
Who's that you're talking about.
Tosser.
I for one know that Harps have enough dedicated fans to make sure the club survives. Good luck to them.
I'd rather die laughing than trying!
Where's the mod edit hereWTF is that all about. Most DERRY CITY fans wud hate to see harps go down the pan. Enuff of the L'Derry bit, the team is called DERRY CITY
I brought up that exact point!
Londonderry was renamed Derry several years ago!
That joke about the Welsh league narrowing the gap with the EL was funny!
I have a massive amount of respect for Harps fan's and nothing but good wishes.
That joke about the Welsh league narrowing the gap with the EL was funny!
Who said that????
good luck to harps
Rovers fans generally all have a positive relationship with harps and their supporters.
best of luck to finn harps getting out of this mess
Poor education system has failed another person!
Have Boot Disk, will travel
I wasn't drawing a distinction between Sligos crowds now versus when you were last in the premier. i was talking about your crowds now versus the last few seasons full-stop. Which, unless I'm badly mistaken, have increased on average. Not because of the seasson, but because of the level of football on offer.
Firstly, where are the robust statistics to support this fact ? Secondly, how are their crowds this year versus the last number of seasons ? Up, I would suggest. You don't appear willing to look beyond the short-term - either in comparing crowds, or in giving Summer football a chance. There's a reason why statisticians use longer-term averages to draw conclusions from. And finally, where is the evidence that it is Summer football that has been the sole, or even primary, cause of this ?
Drogheda getting crowds of 2,000+ at their average game back when they were merely making-up the numbers ? Not the Drogheda Utd that I used to know. Especially as they were relegated in 2000, and only came back up for the first season of Summer football. Even if your crowd stats were right, where is the evidence that it would be the fault solely, or even largely, of Summer football that this has allegedly changed ?
You're completely missing my point RT. I'm saying that we can't give Summer football the credit or blame for any impact re attendances - because it is still to early to say, and we simply don't have the information required to make such a clear conclusion with anythign other than our own personal views/prejudices. There is almost an endless list of variables and factors that impact attendances. The time of year/season is one of them, and it is frankly too early to draw clear and irrefutable conclusions on the impact of that variable in isolation. Hence - I won't list you any clubs, as my point is that we're just not able to do so right now with any degree of confidence or statistical reliability.
So, if the Shels v Harps LC QF had been played on the same night in December, there would've been a significantly larger crowd ?
So here you're effectively saying that weather (and, by extension, season/time of year) is NOT an important factor in football attendances !?! So let me ask you - what factors do you think are the core contributors towards the size of attendance at a football game in Ireland ?I know the usual comment summer footy fans will come out with but who wants to go to games when it is raining and snowing
I never said it would. I understand that there is no single variable that can be isolated in terms of cause-and-effect in football. Without trying to be rude, I don't think you do. Hence, you constantly point to single and isolated variables to say they either will or won't/are or aren't causing impacts that they were never likely to lead to solely in the first place.
Having driven over 9hrs on a round-trip from London to watch the Carmarthen game, I am only too painfully aware of what happened there. However, that single game in isolation says no more about the relative strengths of the Irish and Welsh leagues than Shels draw against Deportivo says about the merits of the EL versus La Liga. Again - you're looking at isolated events and seeking to extrapulate conclusive and broad-ranging conclusions from them.
Across the 2 legs Longford were clearly the better team for 75% of the play. What then happened is something I find hard to believe, even though I saw it with my own eyes. In the 25yrs I've been watching football, I have never seen a team collapse so thoroughly and utterly as Longford did. That is why they lost that game - not due to some imaginery narrowing in standards between the Welsh and Irish leagues. As listed in a previous note, on all the key factors the EL is out-performing the Welsh League, and increasingly so.
As I've said above, it is too early to say - and even if it wasn't, there simply isn't enough statistical evidence (or even evidence that is comparable across clubs) to draw a categorically definitive conclusion re its impact upon attendances. We can all have our suspicions - but to say that Summer football has 100% failed, no debate, and is now the sole or even major cause of attendance problems in Irish football is absolute nonesense.
Last edited by dcfcsteve; 10/07/2006 at 2:04 PM.
I was working off of such fruitful stimulus....
I'll summarise it for you - there is simply not the proof available at this point in time to be able to highlight Summer football in isolation as the sole or primary source of the credit/blame for attendances in the Irish game.
Judging by the wordcount of your posts here dcfcSteve, the book should be a veritable tome
www.WalkTheChalk.com - Stats, Opinion & Bluster on Irish Club Football
Brevity has never been my forté ELP...... !Judging by the wordcount of your posts here dcfcSteve, the book should be a veritable tome
Or at least that's what I try to tell the chicks.......
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