Benners

Re- Save the Bridge question by CB;
 
Never revealed as far as I can remember and seems in line with Kens financial secrecy. 
 
I sponsored goals one season and have a save the bridge Certificate certificate somewhere.
 
Felt more a part of Chelsea then than I feel now. My few pounds helped me bind even more to the Chelsea scene of the time even though Ken probably spent my few quid on a beard trimmer:-

And a pregnant man

Great photo. I love the contrast between the pregnant Rangers shirt man and the topless guy with the blonde wedge haircut next to him. One looks ready for a beach in San Fransisco whilst the other looks fit for a mental home.

The Good
 
So, that first period, the good years, I think anyone would find it hard to dispute that we had very good attendances in our first fifty years (What? History? Us?) but some still do. What’s the evidence for and against?
 
It’s often stated that we have the fifth highest average attendance in English football. The source for this is, I believe, this website:
 
http://www.european-football-statistics.co.uk/attn/nav/attnengleague.htm
 
I couldn’t find the actual page on that site but here’s the list that someone else obviously cut and pasted from it (and is now out of date so the averages are wrong even though I believe the club’s positions remain the same):
 
Average All-time Attendances
1 Man. United                      36, 885
2 Liverpool                                 33, 773
3 Tottenham                              33, 437
4 Arsenal                                    32, 413
5 Chelsea                                   31, 322
6 Newcastle                                31, 038
7 Everton                                   31, 023
8 Man.City                                 28, 631
9 Aston Villa                              27 ,992
10 Leeds                                    25, 634
 
It should be noted that there is an important caveat to these figures. We weren’t around pre-1905 when attendances were much lower and maybe some clubs have suffered because of this by having their average dragged down e.g. Aston Villa . Maybe our average is a little artificially high due to this. Whatever the case, when you examine the years we did exist those first fifty were pretty good by anybody’s standards and there is evidence to show this:
 
·         We have the third highest ever attendance at an English club ground – the 82,905 at the Arsenal game in 1935. (This comes just behind a Man City Cup game and a Man Utd league match played at Maine Road).
 
·         We were the first team to average over 40,000 in a season in 1921.
 
·         We were ten times the best supported club in the country (average attendance) between 1905 and 1955. But only in that last year did we actually win anything. Other than that a third place finish in 1920 was as good as it got. One of those years we were best supported was a relegation year (1924) and another was in Div 2 (1926).
 
·         Also, I believe (maybe not claiming this as a fact since I couldn’t find the list) we have 4 of the top ten highest attendances of all time (this may not be true now with the redevelopment of Old Trafford but I think it still is).
 
Our top five attendances according to the official club website:
 
82,905 Arsenal (12/10/1935) - Highest ever attendance for an English League game
77,952 Swindon Town (13/04/1911) - FA Cup Round 4
77,696 Blackpool (16/10/1948) - Football League
76,000 Tottenham Hotspur (16/10/1920) - Football League
75,952 Arsenal (09/10/1937) - Football League
 
So, you’d think that was pretty unequivocal. Those who argue that we have no history and ask where we were when we were sh*t should take a look at this. This is real history, mostly pre-war and, while were weren’t exactly sh*t compared to the eighties, we were hardly setting the world alight either. Most of those years we were never in the running for anything and finished mid table or worse.
 
There is a reason for the old Norman Long music hall song “On the day that Chelsea went and won the cup”.  It wouldn’t be funny or worth writing about if we weren’t seen at the time as a ‘big club’ with big attendances that was maybe expected to win it. It wouldn’t and couldn’t have been written about Aldershot for instance.
 
Song starts at 3:24. If you’ve never heard it before you really should:
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLgBWOwEXVA
 
So we should get some praise for these attendances from the ‘history’ brigade shouldn’t we? This is surely a period of ‘good’ attendances? Well... no. Firstly they don’t actually know their history, what they repeat ad nauseum is their own prejudice and doesn’t rely on the facts. It’s mostly based on the 80s. Secondly, even if they do know about these figures it still doesn’t satisfy them. They just can’t give us any credit. I’ve had a Scouser tell me our games sometimes got high attendances but our fans were “the most fickle” in the league.
 
Now, I think on one side he was making an argument based on our attendances in the eighties (I’ll cover that elsewhere) and on the other to do with our fluctuating attendances back in the day. For instance his trump card was that one season (38-39) we got 64,443 v Arsenal in October and only 6,801 at home to Liverpool on Christmas Eve.
 
I admit he had me on the back foot after that one for a while because, let’s face it, that’s a pretty shocking fluctuation, but then I did some digging and discovered that in that Christmas period London was in the midst of the worst winter it had experienced in many, many years and half the country from the Wash on down was in snowmageddon territory. London was practically in shutdown. I don’t know if that’s an acceptable excuse (there were about 10,000 at West Ham that day) but it seems fairly valid to me.
 
Then I started looking at other teams’ attendances and the truth is there were loads of clubs who experienced fluctuations just like ours. I found a bunch of others just as bad as that if not worse (on face value). I don’t know what caused Man City to go from 76,166 v Cardiff in one match to 3000 v Forest in another in 23/24 but I’ll bet there was a pretty good reason. In those days postponed fixtures were sometimes rearranged for work days when the factories were full of workers and few could go. Maybe it was the weather again, I don’t know, but we were far from the only two clubs who had this ‘problem’ so it seems to me this was fairly normal for the times:
 
Charlton
1937/8 75,031 v Villa; 14,648 v Stoke
 
Sunderland
1933/4 75,118 v Derby; 3,911 v Pompey (also 9,005 v Middlesbrough)
 
Bolton
1932/3 69,912 v Man City; 5,320 v Pompey
 
Newcastle
1930/31 68,386 v Chelsea; 9,159 v Bolton
 
Sheff Wed
1933/34 72,841 v Man City and 6,546 v Leeds (Mon) and 5,182 v Wolves (Sat)
 
Huddersfield
1931/2 67,037 v Arsenal; 2,963 v Man City
 
Spurs
1936/7 71,913 v Preston; 11,097 v Barnsley
1937/8 75,038 v Sunderland; 11,049 v Stockport
 
Manchester United
1946/7 66,967 v Wolves; 8,456 v Stoke
 
Manchester City
1923/4 76,166 v Cardiff; 3000 v Forest
1925/6 74,799 v Hudds; 11,384 v Arsenal
1933/4 84,569 v Stoke, 13,815 v Liverpool
1934/5 79,491 v Arsenal; 13,899 v Wolves
1936/7 74,918 v Arsenal; 16,146 v Grimsby
1954/5 75,000 v Man Utd; 13,648 v Leicester
1955/6 76,129 v Everton; 15,227 v Everton again (4 days later!) or 13,998 v Charlton
 
Birmingham City
1935/6 60,250 v Villa; 9,089 v Sheff Wed
 
Another point to consider is that, with a bigger ground than most, the potential for getting greater fluctuations existed.
 
So, for me, it’s case dismissed for the naysayers, we had very, very good crowds by the standards of the day which is about the only way you can judge it.
 
And, if we didn't always have bad crowds in the past, what does that mean for the period when we did? Does that make it an aberration rather than the norm?

Agreed mate! It all started for me when some dicks started booing our players after that i lost interest, also all that Lamps and gerrard debate just got on my nerves when most of the press critizised Frank. The players put in f**k all effort, the only one who used to play 100% every England game was JT and he would still get booed. This is the new brand of football fan guilable to the press and far to many morals!