An email lands from Wivenhoe Town FC. Yep it’s that time of year again: season ticket renewal.
If I was a Premier League season ticket holder, then opening an email with my new renewal price would be a task that would fill me with fear. Not so with Wivenhoe.
Oh look, prices have been frozen again for the third consecutive season. £80 for a full-on adult season ticket is a fantastic price in which to watch live football.
The quality of the product, as we must call it, that is on show at Broad Lane is not exactly Premier League standard; but just having a non-league team on your doorstep where you can watch football every other week is not to be sniffed at.
I’ve got plans for the season ahead. These are personal plans but hopefully they will stretch out wider into the community. Watching Wivenhoe last year was a pretty soul-destroying experience. The inevitable relegation was somehow reprieved. Something has to change.
I’ve long since thought that the Dragons may be in Wivenhoe, but they don’t feel part of Wivenhoe. This wasn’t always the case. Some kind of local sense of connection within the community has been lost. I want to take very, very small steps to try and rebuild this.
I’m going to go active online and do all the big-mouth shouting thing to try and get more people up at Broad Lane. I’m not talking the masses, perhaps just three or five extra people on the gate for the first home match.
If they enjoy it then perhaps they might bring along a friend for the next game. It’s here where hopefully we can start a snowball effect and try and get more locals through the gates once again.
I see so many football fans walking around the town wearing their Premier League and Championship tops. They can’t all be going off to London every other weekend or making the short journey to Ipswich. If you’re a football fan you just want to watch live football, right?
The optimism from last season was the small dedicated band of teenage ultras that appeared out of nowhere. They were bloody fantastic. They banged their drums from start to finish and made a right old bloody racket.
It’s this type of local enthusiasm I want to try and capture and hopefully make sure that the club doesn’t have another season like the one we have all just experienced.
Of course I could always freelance it and call in my old friend Wolfgang Moneypenny to help turn around a failing non-league club. The downside there, as Wolfgang knows only too well, is that one man’s personal crusade to create a footballing fiefdom somehow ends up as bloody gentrification.
I don’t think that’s going to happen at Wivenhoe Town to be honest.