We need to start breaking records at the lane.
The last time I wrote a blog was after the 3-3 draw at home to Bolton Wanderers for our first league fixture at Plough Lane, of course now sponsored and officially known as The Cherry Red Records Stadium. From a personal point of view I will always call our home Plough Lane, however I am very grateful that we have found a ground-sponsor and also the money up front which will always help and not expected.
We enter the final stages of looking at refinancing our bridging loan and any monies borrowed, which Ed Leek confirmed is around £4.5m during this weeks Dons Trust (DT) SGM. This is also at a high interest rate (Ed again confirmed this is over 10% rumoured recently) and its important that we refinance this at a lower rate once we have gathered all the pennies towards the £4.5m. I am not a finance person and will not pretend I know what other options are available at certain interest rates, but its really important that all DT members keep in mind that this will come up very quickly in the second quarter of 2022 and its even more important for fans who are not DT members yet to gain an understanding of the situation. With the increased attendance at Plough Lane we are naturally attracting new fans and also fans that have been away from the club for a while either due to location or that KM was only decent if you had a season ticket in the Paul Strank stand or were over 6ft 4in tall. I have seen on many social media platforms and guestbooks fans commenting on how the ground is probably too small for us now and when are we going to build another permanent stand. AFC Wimbledon, CEO Joe Palmer joked about this during our recent podcast interview with him and commented that we should of added a few more thousand to the capacity when we were building it. EP266: ‘The One with Joe Palmer”That is the problem with a brand new stadium as you see something on a match-day that is amazing for the size of our club and look to see what we can do in the future. The stadium isn’t paid for yet and is secured against the bridging loan we took out last year. Lets walk before we try to run….
The DT SGM meeting on Thursday was a hybrid event which means it was available for people online, showing the live feed from Plough Lane’s massive Conferencing area. The TV in the area is now working and is 5ft by 3ft and is fully 4K UHD. I arrived early as George Jones and I were streaming the event live and we needed to set up. The golf was on the TV and the glare that I could feel when a red screen was on the TV was so bright, that I had to cover my eyes. I was told they are going to reduce the brightness or is it contrast of the TV, I can never be sure. Thursday was one of those days when nothing technical seemed to work, regardless of the fact it worked perfectly for the recent “Meet the Manager” event. George and I recorded a intro that we would show as live for the start of the show, but my lav mic decided to not work on my iPad. Our back up was to record on the iPhone with a old mic that I had. That worked perfectly until I then tried to Airdrop it to my iPad and again it just didn’t want to know. I tried other workaround with no success and decided to wait for it to synch with my iPad as it normally does with my photos etc.
Next I set up my main Blue Microphone to pick up the audio from the room and again this decided to not work. I use this for the podcast an SNL and never have problems. I should have realised then and there that the best tactic was to leave and go home!!! We started the meeting and our plan was to use a private YouTube link and screen share it to Zoom as this was a members meeting and we had to control who could see the stream. Within the first few minutes we had live comments that the sound wasn’t of the quality needed. We desperately tried to resolve this and it became apparent that the screen share wasn’t picking up the sound, but instead picking up the audio from the laptop speaker which was nowhere near the quality needed. Thankfully I am not one to panic and used to thinking on my feet, so Jane Lonsdale who was chairing the meeting, took an earlier break than planned and allowed us time to resolve it. The easiest thing to do was to use the actual live feed going into YouTube as I knew this was working and we managed to solve the sound issue. Thankfully the application I use backs up this and records the footage and the sound was very good on this to upload later if required. The good thing from my point of view is we managed to troubleshoot and have learned many things for future live streams. Amazingly the reason my microphone didn’t work was down to my phone charger being a fast charge and having too much power going into the iPad. Technology really does amaze me sometimes!
The interesting thing to come from the DT SGM on Thursday was the difference in numbers from people in the room vs online. The Covid pandemic has changed the outlook for meetings and advanced it five years it seems where people realise they have the capability to work from home and have meetings remotely. The pleasing thing for the hybrid model is it allows overseas DT members to join in along with people who live a distance away from Plough Lane in this country. Like anything though, we have all seemed to have lost the in-person experience for meetings and I have always felt that the in-person DT meetings allow discussion and that was lost with the Hybrid experience. I am confident the Hybrid experience is here to stay and it works, however it needs constant review and improvement to ensure we have vibrant and inclusive DT meetings in the future.
I had another visit to Plough Lane on Saturday with the visit of Sheffield Wednesday for a League One fixture. For the older fans like myself, they are a big club and for us to be playing them in the league is amazing, but the amount of so called ‘big’ clubs in League One this season, they are just one of many that will visit Plough Lane this season. The match-day experience at Plough Lane is improving match by match in my opinion and the addition of live football action showing in The Phoenix and the Cappagh Stand concourse is a welcome addition. I arrived later than normal as I had my son Thomas with me and I know he has about a 3 hour attention span for games and I was worried the food outlets would be busy and I would struggle to get anything. The South Stand fanzone is now the place to be pre-match and I had a wonder down there and it was very busy as is the norm now. Loads of food stalls that included Fish & Chips, Pizza’s and Burger outlets. My only negative was that the food available probably needs to be advertised beforehand or more visible. When its busy, it’s very difficult to view menu’s etc and with this in mind I went back to my tried and tested Sausage Roll from the Cappagh Stand and was pleasantly surprised with 15 minutes to kick off, I only had a few people in front of me.
The game followed a common theme now of us conceding the first goal and on the back foot. Wednesday have a very good squad and rightly so with the budget they have available and we kept ourselves in the game, but it was a really tough first half. I always felt that if we could stay in the game, we could use our subs around the 60 minute mark to use our excellent fitness levels to comeback into the game. I could see Luke McCormick & Arron Pressley ready to come on, when a dubious penalty was awarded and was converted for us to be two adrift. Both subs were involved in the first goal and McCormick set up the equaliser from Jack Rudoni. Its been well documented how young our squad is and Robbo has done his best to not over use them and rest them when needed. Players between 19-23 can’t play Saturday-Tuesday and perform at the levels we have seen them achieve and this is the case with McCormick and Rudoni. McCormick was most Bristol Rovers fans player of the season and it can be argued that he has struggled to find his place in the team and his best position, however when you look at his stats, Saturday’s late cross was his fourth assist of the season and he has also weighed in with three goals. Compare this with the minutes he has been on the pitch and he is averaging an assist every 200 minutes and a goal every 250 minutes. He has played the full 90 minutes, three out of the last five games and arguably would have been a starter if he hadn’t been ill during the week. I am really excited to see what McCormick can do for us moving forward and is still a player I think we will see a high standard from and a flair player in the final third.
Rudoni has been even more protected by Robbo this season, yet is arguably is one of our most effective player this season. Not in the squad for four league games this season, yet has weighed in with four goals, with three of them being crucial goals. Equaliser at Portman Road, late goal for a 3-1 win at home to Oxford and Saturday’s equaliser. He is averaging a goal every 150 minutes in the league and this is certainly going to keep him on the radar of opposition scouts and lets all hope the club are discussing a new contract with him, along with Anthony Hartigan 🙏
Tonight we go to Lincoln City and the home of such lovely trees 😉
I know a lot of fans are gutted that this is a midweek fixture which will naturally reduce the away following. When discussing the game with Nik Tzanev & Cheye Alexander on this week’s Sunday Night Live SNL: 17th October 2021 it became obvious how keen they are for a clean sheet, as we have failed to achieve this in the league this season. Our inability to score first has displayed our resilience and ability to stay in games, but we need to improve on this to give us some easier points in the league. We have conceded seven goals that have given the opposition the lead, yet the flip side is we have scored eight goals that have been equalisers. We are better away from home and won 33% of our games against the league average of 25%. Saturday’s goals added to our goals scored in the final half hour and we have scored 13 goals in that period out of our 19 goals scored in the league this season. Lincoln in comparison have conceded 6 of their 16 goals in the last 30 minutes. We could see some late goals again tonight and hopefully enough to take home the 3 points.
Plough Lane is going to see lots of action over the next few weeks with 3 of the next 4 games at home and also the Ladies team make their debut at Plough Lane this Sunday vs Walton Casuals. Tickets are free and it would be great to beat the record attendance of 530!
The FA Cup will only have 3 subs allowed this season and I say only as the Carabao Cup has changed from 3 to 5 subs midway during the competition to keep our EPL teams happy. I am not so sure they are all that happy now that Newcastle United fans have found their identity and deserved status as the richest team in the world, but that’s for another blog!
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