Many to blame in ticket fiasco

May 16 2007 Red Watch by Andy Proudfoot, Liverpool Daily Post

WHAT an extraordinary atmosphere at Anfield last Sunday.

The anticipated wave of euphoria as we sent the team off to Athens turned into a simmering tide of resentment as the impact of Ballotgate became all too apparent.

Demonstrations outside the ground? Banners in the stands calling for the head of one of our senior managers?

Even Souness and Houllier never got this treatment near the end of their turbulent reigns. The irony of a mosaic lauding the contribution of David Moores, who has just trousered £80m plus for selling the club, seen alongside banners calling for the head of Rick Parry, who has just secured investment of £200m plus, cannot have been lost on our chief executive.

But the level of dissatisfaction with the manner of the Champions League final ticket allocation was undoubtedly higher than I’ve ever witnessed for any previous occasion. As the complaints rose around me in the stands on Sunday, I began to feel positively guilty over my success in the ballot, despite seeing over 40 games this season. So is it a fair Kop on Parry?

First in the dock, m’lud, must be UEFA. A woefully inadequate allocation of just 17,000 tickets, the insult compounded by an official spokesman declaring that we had done well to get this many, is of course at the root of the problem.

Notwithstanding the odious allocation of around 20,000 tickets to the UEFA ‘family’, most of which are corporate sponsors or hospitality providers, the action which really gets my goat is the 7,000 reduction in the capacity of the stadium to accommodate the minimum size of perimeter advertising hoarding.

Is there any clearer sign of UEFA’s priorities when choosing between money and fans’ interests? For their shameless avarice, there can be only one verdict: guilty as charged.

Next up, Rick Parry, accountable for the manner in which our pitiful allocation is distributed to the fans.

The case for the defence it appears is this: at the start of the season, it was made very clear that those purchasing tickets for the earlier rounds of the competition would be given priority in the later rounds; and every season ticket holder was given the chance to reserve their tickets through the auto-application scheme.