Sheringham Canary

The Club is going to have two new scoreboards, this time colour with better graphic capability - essentially an upgrade of what''s at Portaloo Road.  The cost is about £60k, but this will be offset by the ability to generate more sponsorship income because what can be shown is far greater.  They should be in the same place, give or take, as the existing ones. The cost of a giant screen, by contrast, would be something in the region of £1m.  Quite how anyone could construe that spending that sort of money on a scoreboard instead of on the pitch is ''putting football first'' is beyond me ... There may also be a legal issue with placing anything in front of the hotel because the Club doesn''t actually own the land anymore - that was ''sold'' to the hotel company on a 150-year lease for just over £1m.  The reason there''s some space left between the hotel and the pitch is that its restaurant and conferencing facilities are somewhat limited, so there''s a reliance on (and a partnership with) the Club to use the facilities within the ground.  Should the Club ever leave Carrow Road, logically the site would be developed for housing - leaving the hotel with lots of houses around it and no-where to house conferences.  At that point, the owners would simply use the spare land they owned to add the necessary rooms.    

I finished the 92, as existed at the time, at Sunderland''s Roker Park in January 1996 - Ashley Ward''s goal giving us a 1-0 win, which I think was Gary Megson''s first away victory as manager.  I wanted to finish at a ground that had some history and character, so I started to try and plot how to do that when I had about 10 left.  When I started out life travelling to away games with my father for the FA Cup QF at the Goldstone Ground in 1983, I certainly never expected to finish by the age of 26.  The closer you get, the more of an obsession it becomes to finish, although I was really lucky in getting 31 in a single season with Norwich when I started going to every away game, supplemented by plenty of blank International Saturdays to add others. Since then, I''ve lost a few because Clubs have moved and new entrants have joined the Football League, so I guess I''m in the high 80''s of the current grounds.  BTW, you don''t need ticket stubs to join the 92 Club (at least, you didn''t when I qualified) - the only requirement is to complete a list of games with date, match, competition, result and attendance. The best ground?  Well, having been to the Trophy final last week the new Wembley takes some beating - certainly on a par with the San Siro.  For Club grounds in this country, Old Trafford before the Stretford End was seated always produced a good atmosphere, and Anfield has always been a ground for the ordinary fan above the corporate pound. The worst? Probably Barnet, although the awful result didn''t exactly help ...        

When the Barclay was first built, the lower tier was - as many have said - an unreserved seating area.  This changed on higher profile games when the Barclay was likely to be full, and then season ticket holders had a designated seat they occupied. The problem then, and almost certainly it would apply at least as stringently now, is the the County Council''s Safety Advisory Group would only issue a safety certificate for the ground provided the capacity of unreserved areas was reduced by 10%.  I don''t know the exact season ticket numbers in the lower Barclay, but I imagine cutting nearly 300 spaces out might well create a problem even before someone tried to put it into practice ... In terms of safe standing areas, the imposition of all-seater stadia is entirely down to successive Governments.  As the Government has a appointee (dressed up as a member of the Football Licensing Authority) ''advising'' the Safely Advisory Group of every local authority, I''m afraid the immediate prospect of terracing reappearing in the top two divisions is pretty remote - let''s face it, this is the unelected body that finds it difficult to accept that people may stand up in a seated area for more than a few seconds at a time.