Our Good Friday trip to Oxford United has been put back to 8pm, thanks once again to our very good friends at Sky Sports. It’s our first ever visit to the Kassam Stadium, which is in the far south of the city.

To help you find it, there are plenty of brown football signs to show you the way From the A423 Ring Road, take the A4074 towards Reading. After the roundabout with Sainsbury’s on one corner, take the left-turning signposted Cowley/Wallington/Oxford Science Park, and you eventually come to the ground on your left. If you want to be modern and use a Satnav, the postcode is OX4 4XP.

The official Oxford United website says that away supporters should head for car park B1 or B2, opposite the VUE cinema, which is right outside the stadium, and close to the turnstiles for our section. Parking here is free and on a first come, first served basis, and once it’s full we If these are full you will be directed to the overflow carpark. You can park on some of the roads beyond, but you will need to look out for the inevitable residents only signs that apply to some of the streets.

Oxford Railway Station is over four miles from the ground, though the 3A bus from the city centre to the ground runs every half-an-hour for most of the day. Unfortunately there isn’t one back after the game until 10.47pm, so by the time you get back to the station there will be little chance of getting a train to anywhere, never mind back to Leeds.

There are usually no restrictions on which pubs near the Kassam can be used by away fans, but the official Oxford website says “for high-profile matches this may be reviewed”. Do they mean us? I’m told the best of the nearby pubs are:-

Kings Arms – Church Rd, Sandford-on-Thames, Oxford OX4 4YB
George Inn – 5 Sandford Rd, Littlemore, Oxford OX4 4PU
The Blackbird – Blackbird Leys Rd, Oxford OX4 6HT

Oxford played at four different grounds during their first 20 years, before moving to the Manor Ground in the Headington district of the city, in 1913. As we know from several visits between 1984 and 1994, that was a quite ramshackle affair with an open away terrace and seemingly three different small stands down one side.

It was never going to be practical to try to bring it up to the standards demanded by the Taylor Report, so in 2001, they moved into the brand new Kassam Stadium. It would be a standard soul-less identikit new venue, if it wasn’t for the unique feature of only having three stands, and that has heavily criticised by making the place very windy and lacking in atmosphere.

The original plan was to have four sides, it’s just that the club were doing badly at the time the stadium was built, so they wanted to save the construction costs, as three stands were enough to accommodate those fans who were still turning up. And although their fortunes have improved since the fourth stand has never been built, leaving them a capacity of a mere 12,500.

Out of that, our allocation is 1,434 seats in the North stand, in the blocks closest to the infamous void where the west stand should be. They have of course sold out by now, with adults at £28, and five categories of concessions from £8 to £21. Tickets for the home stands are only on sale to anyone who had a booking history before March 15th this year.

And their official website says that anyone found before the day of the game to have bought a ticket in a section of the ground “where they do not belong” will have their tickets cancelled and refunded, less a £10 administration fee. And anyone identified as a Leeds fan in a home stand during the game “will be ejected from the ground for the purposes of their own safety”. So if you are going to be in such a seat you will need to avoid drawing attention to yourself.

With the Kassam being a fairly new stadium the facilities are quite good, though the food options are quite limited. Especially since they stopped selling burgers after an unflattering picture of one on the ‘FootyScran’ website went viral prompting “shocking and upsetting” comments from fans!

At least they usually sell alcohol, and there is always the van in the south-west corner of the main car park, which sells freshly-made bacon rolls. And we can content ourselves with the thought that this might be our only ever visit to the Kassam, as the club hasn’t been able to agree an extension to their lease on the stadium with it’s owner, their former chairman Firoz Kassam.

That runs out at the end of the 2025/26 season, on the Triangle site in Kidlington, which is on the opposite side of Oxford. It will be just as far from the city centre, but one bit of good news is that it will be more accessible by public transport, being close to Oxford Parkway railway station. The other is that unlike the current venue it will have four sides, and a capacity of 16,000.

So if we do have to go to Oxford again in future, we might just be able to enjoy a slightly bigger allocation. Now there’s something to look forward to!

Some of this stuff came from www.footballgroundguide.com.

Photo: Action Images

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