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Just Another Saturday
Just Another Saturday
Friday, 1st Oct 2010 09:37

For Saints supporters the game against AFC Bournemouth will be just another Saturday or will it ?

The answer is not quite ! of course Saints supporters dont consider Bournemouth rivals in the way that we do Pompey, indeed quite the opposite we have an affinity for them and I know of Saints fans who will pop along and watch them sometimes when Saints arent at home, in a way that no Saints fan would consider doing at Fratton Park.

So this fixture does have a little more interest than most other fixtures at SMS this season, but not in the way that the visit of Pompey would have.

It is of course the first league fixture between the clubs in almost 51 years, you would need to be in your sixties to remember going to the last one, its been diluted a bit by the fact that we met them in the Carling Cup a few weeks back, but its a local derby we down here dont care about,purely because its very rarely actually been played, 14 league meetings in seven season plus one FA Cup pairing in the 50's was then followed by a Carling cup two legged game in 1987, the sum total of our competitive meetings.

For us at St Mary's it will just be another big crowd, but to put things in perspective as to the gulf in size and support that exists between the two clubs you only have to look at the attendances this season, on Tuesday the Cherries had their biggest gate of the season when 6,823 watched what could be termed a local derby with Exeter, certainly a fair chunk of Devonians were present, this gave them a season aggregate of 30,820 with an average of 6, 164.

Compare that with our crowd stats. we are on 19,805 average at present, a gate of around 25k would see that average push up to the 21k mark our average of last season, but if their is a late surge in tickets then Cherries fans could suffer the embarresment of being in a crowd at St Mary's of more people than have watched them in their five league games at Dean Court or whatever its called now(It will always be Dean Court to me)

These figures start to put the difference in the Clubs into perspective, the Bournemouth area including Poole is bigger than Southampton, however its just not a football town in the way that Southampton is and Portsmouth as well for that matter, we Saints fans have to be big enough to accept our position in football at present, we are below AFCB in the league tables on merit, a position we have only known on rare occasions, two years to be precise in the 50's when they finished above us, we should applaud them for their achievments over the past couple of years, Eddie Howe has proved that this division is about managing a team and not neccessarily having money to burn and i for one raise a cheer for that.

So on Saturday I hope that both sets of fans respect the other, Saints fans for what Bournemouth have been through and how they have built up a decent team and Bournemouth fans should respect what Saints have done as a club in the past fifty years since we last met in the league.       

Photo: Action Images



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jhp767903 added 10:42 - Oct 1
Just to firstly agree with most of the sentiments above, but to add further context.
With regards to size of respective clubs, we (Saints), although not having the best start to the season, have the highest average home crowds in our league and only six championships clubs are currently higher. (These not not include our "friends" to the east!).
From a footballing perspective we, based on last six games, are 20th in our division and "Boscombe" are 3rd. We therefore go into the game as "underdogs", but watch this space. COYR
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sholingred added 18:06 - Oct 1
We need to smash boscombe,put them in their place and climb up the league.c.o.y.r
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