Here are some pics from last night
North stand Queue for the Kiwi bar about 30 mins prior to kickoff.
Normally I have no problem getting a pre match pint from this bar, but not last night.
One thing I noticed from the picture is that there appears to be only a single serving point.
This is ridiculous.
Normally at Saints games there are three or four queues for people on different tills.
The Marching Inn on the half way line also had a sizeable queue
Aussie Bar in the north stand looked like fairly normal sized queue.
You will notice in all the above pics that the concourses are nice and try. There was a breeze blowing round the area though.
Below I have a pic from the Samoa game at Warrington, showing the rather claustrophobic South Stand. (half way line terrace).
You can also see in the distance a large queue for beer and food. It starts under the v14 sign and finishes near the v13 sign. So its not fair to say that long queues for drinks are purely a Saints thing.
I will add however that Warrington are far superior at telling people what they sell and how much things cost.
They have big signs showing the price of food and the various meal deals on offer, for example I was instantly aware from signs that they sold Dominos Pizza within the stand.
Saints however don't advertise at all what they sell, and also don't display clearly the prices of food on sale. I would go as far as saying that Saints may be in breach of various Sales laws re failure to properly display prices.
Anyway back to more pics.
This one shows the extremely packed North stand at half time. This was the busiest ive ever seen it. I suspect the bad weather encouraged people to decamp to the back of stand to warm up a bit.
Onto pitch side view.
This isn't my normal spec so its hard to compare, but I didn't notice the wind as much in the seats as in the past. I also thought the noise from the west stand seemed to carry better than in the unclad stadium.
The true test of this will be next season.
I also noticed that more people seemed happy to stand in the North West corner. This is probably a good indication that fans are getting a lot more protection from the elements now.