Crowd versus India

[boney bee]

A pity that there was such a poor turnout for a worthwhile cause.
I did predict this however but got slagged off!
I repeat and stick by my thoughts that trying to attract the Asian Community to Griffin Park is like Pi*sing in the wind?
If they cant support their own cause then they aint gonna flock to watch The Bees.

Apologies from all those who slaughtered me for expressing an opinion earlier will be accepted on the following topic.....

 

[EE]

So the crowd for a midweek match was 3624 and the gate against ex-Prem Cov on Saturday 1850. Let's be realistic here.

 

[davebee]

3600 isnt that bad for a friendly, if we get off to a start tyhen hopefully crowds will improve

 

[GABS]

Even the QPha pe-season a little while back only got 5,000 ish - so come on Bee fair !

 

[yateleybee]

The replies seem to be missing the point.

We were playing a huge country with a large indiginous population living nearby. For those people, it was a once a year opportunity to see their national team play locally.

If they are such huge football fans, more than a couple of thou would have shown up.

The truth is, cricket is their bag, and that will not change for a long time. For me, the attendance proves that concentrating on bringing in asians to our club is a waste of rescources.

For me, any promotions should be to the community as a whole, but specifically to the local lads on the estates in and around Brentford, who are priced out of watching Chelsea. If not we may lose them to the scum from Stephenson road.

 

[Spiderbee]

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by yateleybee:
The replies seem to be missing the point.

We were playing a huge country with a large indiginous population living nearby. For those people, it was a once a year opportunity to see their national team play locally.

If they are such huge football fans, more than a couple of thou would have shown up.

The truth is, cricket is their bag, and that will not change for a long time. For me, the attendance proves that concentrating on bringing in asians to our club is a waste of rescources.

For me, any promotions should be to the community as a whole, but specifically to the local lads on the estates in and around Brentford, who are priced out of watching Chelsea. If not we may lose them to the scum from Stephenson road.</font>

Do you mean Stevenage Road Y/Bee??

 

[AB]

I don't see encouraging new support to be an all or nothing thing. Just because BFC is finally making efforts to attract the local Asian community doesn't mean that they have given up on other local residents. I thought that last season they started giving free tickets to particular streets in the area. Of course, there were plenty of people on here moaning then about giving away too many freebies.

As to the attendance for the India game, I agree that it wasn't huge, particularly in the light of some of the more inflated estimates in the press and coming from the club. At the same time, for a "nothing" game, we got a bigger (or at least similar- I haven't looked up the stats) attendance than we normally got last season for midweek league matches. The proportion of the local Indian community who attended the match must be much greater than the proportion of the local non-Indian community who came to see Brentford then, or indeed at any league match in the last couple of years.

The Indian fans who were there showed by the atmosphere they generated that they enjoyed the match and liked being there. Remember also that although football is popular in India, the national team is pretty new and not yet terribly successful- it isn't like here where we can point back to years of history for the English national team, harking back to 1966 and all that. I imagine if the England team went to play in India they would be a bigger crowd puller than the Indian team for this reason.

I don't think anyone expected this to lead to 1000 Indians immediately going out and buying STs. It might mean however that BFC becomes an option that they consider in the future, whereas in the past they might not have been interested on watching live football at all.

 

[South Acton Bee]

Leyton Orient 1 India 1
att.1,707

so the score and crowd was not that bad hey!

 

[AB]

No-one can deny today that very many people of black African and Caribbean descent both like and are very good at football. Don't see very many as fans at matches though do you? What might that mean? Perhaps it might mean that they don't like the way they get treated at football (there are still some teams fans today who make monkey noises and throw bananas at black players- if a highly paid professional gets treated like that, how does your averaged punter feel?).

I fear there is something of an empathy failure here. Surely anything that tries to attract new people to the Bees is worthwhile? Surely the club should be applauded for making an effort to attract those who have never thought of coming? Given our low level of support, surely these efforts should be ongoing? Targeting specific groups is an effective marketing strategy. Just because one of the groups being targeted can be defined by race doesn't make the whole thing a racial issue or PC or any other cr*p.

 

[Stanley]

Hear hear...it was a very worthy effort by the club and over 3500 for a midweek friendly is good by any standards. If the club wants to attract more supporters from the Asian community its' not going to happen overnight..this was only a start.

 

[Tommy69]

The other thing is that it was an evening game - its not really in the Indian culture to go out in the evenings, especially unaccompanied kids! A Saturday afternoon game could have got another 1000.