West Ham Till I Die
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Nigel Kahn’s Column

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The Predictor League for Burnley is open. Enter your team HERE. Deadline is Saturday at 1pm.

Hurrah, finally it has arrived. No, not the cup win against lower league opposition but this coming Saturday we have a Saturday game that kicks off at 3 pm, the time-honoured traditional kick-off time that many of us still pine for.

No big shock though as with the current situation the country finds itself in, the mass televising of football has been welcomed it seems by the fans, but when/if we ever get back to where we were pre March 2020 with fans allowed on mass in the stadium how will the traditional 3 pm Saturday kick-off be treated?

Short History lesson. The reason why games kicked off at 3 pm on a Saturday was that it allowed factory workers to make the matches. The 1850 Factories Act stopped the working day on a Saturday at 2 pm so when organised football took off in the late 19th century, it made sense to put kick-off times to when your audience could attend.

Fast forward to the early 1960s and the non televising of football games live that kicked off at 3pm was partly brought about to protect the clubs to keep fee-paying match attending fans going to games and not staying at home to watch. Burnley’s owner at the time, a man called Bob Lord, was the big pusher of this and to the point, he refused any TV cameras into Turf Moor, basically Match of the Day cameras, until the late 60s. There appears to be no legal reason to not televise 3pm Saturday games just an agreement between the league administrators to not allow it.

Now with fans only able to see games by watching on TV, the fans are getting used to the new way of consuming the game to the extent when we are back in the ground will the previous status quo resume.

Most fans of any club do not attend games, and I do not include the foreign legions that now follow us, as they always watched on TV.

Will the home-based fans that generally don’t attend but have for the past year and the rest of this season going forward got used to seeing every game accept when fans are back in the ground and the game is not one of the 5 TV picks you can’t watch it (legally).

Should the 3 o’clock kick-off go back to being protected by a TV blackout or do you think that with the change we have seen in the past year in televising every game, that the administrators and clubs should find a way to continue?

Currently, we are having top-flight teams playing nearly every day of the week either cup or Premier league games. Should that be allowed to continue once fans can attend again? Let us know in the comments.

Hammers United are starting the drip-feed release of the results of their Survey. Currently, we don’t know how many took the survey so we don’t know how much of a snapshot of the fanbase it is. Once we have all the info, only then can us so-called commentators of the club try to put together our take on it. We also have not heard the club’s results of their survey that was produced at the same time so kudos to HU in starting to get their information out to the public.

*The circus is back in business people, it’s transfer window season and the people that make a living from giving you the news either exclusively or 1st or maybe both, are jockeying for position as the go-to person for the best info, but how much of that info is real or how much of that information have they put together with educated guesses.
We are currently linked with 5 forward players – Josh King, Giroud, Baku, Dia and Sima. Frankly which one we get I care not one jot. I’ll leave that to the club to chose. Hopefully, they will make the right choice, but I doubt it if their previous track record of signing strikers is anything to go by and while fans beg for info on who we are signing the club announces new directors to sit on the board.

These directors are not shareholders in the club or will be directors of the WH Holdings that own the club but will be directors of the football club itself which I think is classed as a subsidiary of the main company. Why have they done this? Is this a sign of future-proofing the club in the case of one or both the Daves being incapacitated.

The truth it seems is that they want their wife and son and mates to be able to go to games. Quite why Eve wants to go I’m not sure because I cant say I’ve ever seen a photo of her smiling at a game.

It seems only directors of the club can currently attend games so to get them into the ground the only way to do that was to make them directors. They won’t have any say in any way the club is run, so it seems the hashtag #GSBOUT is safe and does not need expanding to #GSBVSDCOUT.

Still, nice to see we are all in it together.

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