Mr.Carrow

Yet you'll be utterly cr@pping yourselves coming to CR and you know without a shadow of a doubt that you'll blow the play offs.

I've recommended my nephew the book "Cynical Theories" about the Critical Theories (the roots of Identity politics), Pinker, Haidt and Evolutionary psychology. Surprise surprise, the only exposure he's had to these ideas is through the likes of Joe Rogan who, surprise surprise is regularly smeared as "far right". It remains to be seen if he wants to risk being failed for wrongthink in our ideologically captured educational institutions thereby wasting many years and a ton of money. Of course Gramsci and the Frankfurt schoolers knew exactly the power of social coercion and incentives they could unleash once they flipped the victim/victimiser dichotomy from class to identity. I almost admire them. It was very clever and it's worked. We are now living in Marcuse's "repressive tolerance". As for the AFD, from the Guardian article i read it was an open ended discussion on pro's and con's at a meeting which has subsequently (predictably) been spun to be a defining policy commitment. Much as far left meetings will have regularly discussed defunding the police, disrupting the nuclear family,, reparations, equality of outcome etc but anyone who points out that these ideas are fundamentally Communist is called all the usual slurs. Classic ideological propaganda tactics- exaggerate and spin anything from the other side, whilst downplaying, ignoring or misrepresenting the extremes of your own side. Congratulations, it's working.

I would suggest that your tendency to infer bad motivations without requisite evidence (as per your reply to Fen Canary) is highly culturally dependent. I'm living in a country sadistically decimated within living memory by a guy who was trained in Paris by the French Communist party. Here, as in much of Eastern Europe, the cultural ogre hiding behind every metaphorical rock is the return of that vicious, anti human ideology just as in Europe everything culturally suspect is quickly linked to 1930's Germany. Yet in the West even Liberal values such as free speech and the open marketplace of ideas are increasingly branded "right wing" , whilst rebranded Communist concepts such as equality of outcome ("equity") are normalised. Frustrated Communists such as the Frankfurt school group are still being taught with reverence in my nephews Sociology University course. Any thinking person from a recently Communist country can identify what is going on here- I've met plenty. In a culture which can only see Totalitarian threat coming from one extreme and goes out of it's way to make excuses for the other extreme, it should be obvious which one is more likely to blindside you. In short the Left needs to look in the mirror and have a reckoning with itself and stop insisting that "Left" and "Liberal" are interchangeable when they are clearly anything but. Even Orwell pointed out that the British Left had essentially cosied up to Stalin in the fight against Fascism.

If you watch Barnes he plays most of the game with his back to goal. His job is to make the ball stick in dangerous areas of the pitch, then bring the more creative players into play- and he's pretty good at it. Sara would only really work in that position if we went back to possession based football rather than counter punching and I'm of the opinion that with the players we have the latter is more effective (as born out by results).

Milei is pretty much the opposite of Wilders being an open borders Liberal absolutist, yet both are lazily branded "fascists". I've always voted Left and agreed with much of Meloni's viral speech about us all being turned into atomised units of consumption. Many of the current shibboleths of "Left" orthodoxy are in many ways closer to Fascism than the centre Right (obsession with hierarchies based on immutable characteristics, anti-semitism etc). Unfortunately people love grandstanding their moral righteousness based on very little thought or accurate information (just our evolved desire to play status games and make sure we reap the rewards of conforming to the latest social conventions). Authoritarian/Liberal is a better paradigm for thinking about modern politics than Left/Right imo.

Support first, have a good moan at the end if things go to pot. I at least have respect for people who do that.

There are sets of fans who are generally quite loud but who are equally loud when they're p*ssed off. The thing is they usually support first and moan/boo if things go badly. CR is dominated by people who are silent when things are going well, but suddenly very vocal when disgruntled. These days i go to CR hoping the ref has a shocker, or the opposition are dirty foulers so at least the moaners take it out on something other than their own players and club.

Why do perfect assume others want to sit where they always sit when they have the chance to try somewhere different?

Why?

16,000 sold as per official site. Club expecting 19-20,000.

He was the best player on the pitch in that game.

Well given that we can't know the breakdown between season ticket holders and casuals for Cup games, neither of us can prove our point. And all clubs do ticket offers for the early rounds and even big clubs struggle to hit 10k. We've had early round cup games kick off delayed due to the queues trying to get in in recent years. Our attendances have been astonishing for that level of game.

We have already proven your point wrong many times. Against non league Luton in the cup we had a 26521 sell out. Many of our early round cup games have been over 20k and often amongst the highest in the country. Saturday won't be that but I guarantee it will be better than many clubs supposedly bigger than us.

Doesn't really work like that though. Football is addictive and in many respects clubs have to cultivate support with ticket deals etc as we did 20 years ago and 1p5wich have done recently. People drift away and find other things to do, especially when every time they try to get a good bunch of seats together it's utterly impossible.

They don't know which single seats will be left until the day of the game, and if they advertise "half price single seats" many people will hold off buying until the day. Don't think that's really feasible. I do agree with you and sony that there are probably more proactive things the club can do and that they have become extremely complacent. But It's not much good talking about what Swansea etc are doing when they have 7-8000 good seats available per game whereas we have 6-800 restricted view and single seats. To revive the support and atmosphere we need more seats.

With respect, how/why would we implement cheap tickets if every ticket except restricted view and single seats sell out anyway? The issue is that CR is effectively a closed shop dominated by an ageing demographic who generally go out of habit or because they've got nothing better to do. The only way to open the ground up to new, more vibrant demographics is expansion. Then we can maybe offer cheaper tickets for teens/large groups etc.

Our under 21's are the best crop for years. Stuffed full of prospects. Adegboyega, Welch, Montoia, Aboh highly rated with others doing well on loan.

Southampton players are higher paid than ours, so by your logic it was a great result today, right?

These people never actually follow up on their words though. Every average/poor season there's talk of a season ticket boycott/'nobody i know is renewing", yet every season they sell out easily. I genuinely think it would be positivefor the club if 5000 or so quit. Most of those tickets would be resold to people actually excited about going.

Unfortunately it feels like one of those unsolvable problems. Negative, pessimistic people don't change when it's pointed out to them, they double down and dig their heels in. And a lot of people don't want to go to games to be surrounded by people silently waiting for something to complain about. It's utterly depressing. The only thing that can change the cultural dynamic at CR is expansion.

What has Ipswich, Portsmouth etc not coming close to selling out when not doing well, got to do with the fact that we have constantly been selling out for 15 years no matter how we're doing? You are actually arguing against your own point. And, as pointed out earlier, we are still selling out of season tickets, have a waiting list and easily sell decent seats that become available.

The urban population of Milton Keynes is much the same as that of Norwich because most of Norwich's suburbs are officially part of county seats. Norfolk's population is nigh on 1 million and can almost be classed as a "captive market" for NCFC as it's so difficult to get to other clubs of a similar level.

The point is there is many times the demand for decent seats as for rubbish ones. In terms of percentage seats sold we've been one of the top clubs in the country outside the big six for about 15 years. That's because virtually every club struggles to sell single and restricted view seats.

Decent seats still sell out easily. Huddersfield sent back 2 blocks, Southampton 1 block and both sold out easily. Pointing to a few hundred empty single or restricted view seats as evidence of lack of demand is silly. A bigger South Stand would sell out easily on the evidence of blocks not taken by away teams. Plus we still have a season ticket waiting list.

It's interesting that Knapper- who claims to be a football purist- arriving has coincided with two of our best technical players in Nunez and Sainz getting a run and improving the team markedly. Maybe Knapper politely pointed out that if you don't give the ball away so often, you don't have to run around as much to win it back.