Cobblers36, no there wasn't 1000 paying CCFC fans. The official figure for home supporters was 996. We all know the reality that free complimentary tickets were given out. Fisher admitted that on the radio this morning.
This whole fiasco is shameful.
Edit : According to the official literature I have seen there were around 1,000 paying customers in the Coventry end - not suggesting those figures aren't tweaked slightly etc.
The official attendence was given as 996 (or was in 976, can't remember off the top of my head, under 1K anyway). We know that the 2 centre blocks in the main stand were held by the club for players wifes, guests etc and we know lots of free tickets were floating around so the number who actually paid to get in is more likely nearer 500 than 1K.
Not sure what people are expecting the press to show. When SISU took over we averaged over 20K, last season we averaged over 10K, this year we're in a stadium that holds under 8K and was only a quarter full and over half of them were Bristol fans! Whatever way you try and spin it the attendance was way below what SISU were expecting. Just look at Fisher at the forum, expect 6-7K, worse case 3K. He's 50% short of that already. What happens when we're playing someone that doesn't bring over 1K with them?
I suspect he is hoping that by going on a good entertaining run of wins some fans will start to turn up - I think they would but it still wouldn't be many!
It doesn't explain the whole discrepancy, but there would also have been people who couldn't go yesterday for whatever reason, as well as people who refused to go as they see both sides as complicit in this mess, and they viewed the charity match as supporting ACL.
Its the ones who no longer care that we should consider as its very sad that some of these maybe lost for ever.
Also, we need to think about our younger supporters as now the JSBs no longer exist and this is where a lot of our furure support comes from, however at the Ricoh yessterday I would esitmate a quater of the fans were under 12 years old.