Wrong eh? 8300 sold eh? You telling me nearly 4000 bought tkts and did not turn up cos of a cm of snow?
Pathetic as I feared! The "new shed" was a joke and totally out sung by Cas fans! We don't deserve super league let alone a new stadium.......and as for the team!

Welcome to my world matey......

Pev,please mate,it won`t work,god i have tried over the years,what i find is word of mouth,yeah, telling lies about how great our team is,and what a fantsatic sport ours is,well maybe that isnt a lie after all,but our team is.

We don`t get the local rag here either,tonight i took 2 neighbours to there first ever game of rugby league.

I have seen the stick you get on here, some of it maybe justified when you get a little exercised like I am now but this lot just don't get it! You pay peanuts you get monkeys! You do what you have always done you get what you have always had! 10 years they say this was in the making and they allow the whole rugby world to see an empty stadium on tv! They should have handed them out to the 25000 that visited the Trafford centre today despite the snow!
The reason for my attitude is that we have played our trump card and failed-miserably! We can't blame the willows anymore for a crap team, no fans and a poor atmosphere!
You'll all say give it time but you only get one chance to make a first impression and we blew it spectacularly!

I feel for you Shedite, this has been going on for 30 years with these fiasco's and it isn't going to get any better until the right people are put in the right places regarding off the field matters.... How right was Matt Parish......

Enough said,now is the time to all stick together,and try for the sake of our beloved club,because if we don`t who will,to come together,this is our last chance lads.

And you watched on tv?

To be fair I thought the attendance was not that bad as an outsider. Given that as an outsider , most of what I've heard from Salford in the off season has been more about the coach leaving than the new stadia, then I imagine that is what most potential new fans have seen. So any new fans has to be an improvement given the offseason.

Salford held their own for most of the match, it was not a whitewash unlike the pitch, but Salford are always going to need a full side out to match other teams on the field. The loss of Godwin takes out a key player. Then there was the forced change with the fella who got knocked senseless by the ball in his face.

With the turmoil in the offseason I was actually expecting alot worse for Salford, maybe even challenging Widnes for the wooden spoon. Most expect Castleford to make the top 8 this year, if you can get your pack going a little better it may not be all doom and gloom. Smith had a few nice touches and swept the line well from some kicks. But he needs back up at half back and there are a fair few knocking about SL nowa days. Don't know about the salford academy, but I know some wigan fans have mentioned they have a young fella they hope to be a good prospect for the future. Maybe worth looking at who is out there on a loan deal if holdworth is not up to it.

The figure of 5,242 was announced inside the ground during the game. So quite where Sky's apparent 4k figure you mention came from is beyond me.

That shouldn't detract from the fact that it's still 3,000 short of what we should have been pulling in at the bare minimum.

I am disappointed with the attendance, and disheartened because people at the club must have put a lot of effort into organising everything for last night, and getting the match on in the first place, given the weather. It's just typical that the snow had to come on the day of our first game.

The weather would have been a big deciding factor for a lot of the fringe fans looking to pay on the day, and the attendance has clearly been skewed by the snow. How many people were put off by the snow? Had the attendance been an extra 800 or so to 6000, would it have been so bad? Still disapointing for the first game, but I'd be happy with a 6k average crowd for the season. The next home game will give a better indication of how well we're doing in terms of crowd.

Had it been at the Willows, same weather conditions, still on Sky etc, I think the crowd would have been significantly less than what it was. So at least there was some improvement, although not as much as anyone hoped.

No disrespect to Cas, but traditionally, they would have been one of your lower attendances of the year anyway?

Couple this point with the rotten weather and you still have grounds for optimisim that your crowd numbers will improve.

The visits of Saints/Wigan/Wire/Leeds will surely entice a few more of your casual fans to pay a visit, plus those type of sides will fetch big numbers of their own fans too.....I would imagine for those 4 games, you must be aiming for the 10,000 mark if your marketing team does its job properly.

last years game against cas in the middle of June attracted 3587 fans, so despite the weather and the game being on Sky we got 5242, an increase of 46% any marketing team on earth would be singing from the rafters about such a massive increase.

Anyone who doesn't see that the weather had a massive impact on the attendance is living cloud cuckoo land.
I'd bet that there was a few a people who had bought tickets didn't attend never mind casual/curious fans, that was the coldest I've been stood watching a game and in that I include the midweek Batley game years ago.
Still say that the attempted pre match entertainment last night will be a winner in the summer, the stadium people should be more realistic at this time of year as to what they can achieve.

Agree entirely.....I'm one of the neutrals who isn't totally convinced by the location of your ground, but to judge its potential on last night's showing is a little harsh.

One of your biggest problems is people expecting an immediate 'Warrington' effect to your club....To be fair, we had a decent season in the run-up to our move, leading to a pleasant expectation that things were heading the right way on the pitch. There was also the Simon Moran influence at the club, which also was adding to the general excitement of things.

As I mentioned, I think one of your disadvantages, in comparison to the Halliwell Jones, is the location of your ground. Ours is very central and gives a general feeling of being part of a community....Yours is very much isolated and will require good marketing to get people to feel a 'part' of it.

Personally, I feel its going to be a long road for you, both on and off the pitch, but to be so negative after just 1 game seems a little odd.

Hang on a bit...I take it you never attended any games at Watersheddings in the winter rugby era.?
I was at the Trafford Centre last night picking my son up from work whilst you lot were actually playing and the outside temp was 0.50 centigrade, cold yes but hardly finger numbing as demonstrated by the players on both sides who I thought were a credit to the game of rugby league.
Fact is despite what you want to believe it is a tall ask to increase your crowds up to *k or more just because you are renting a new stadium, it's the product on the pitch which brings the fans in and a constant winning team would help you achieve that.Sadly from your fans point of view you ain't got one.

The "tickets sold but people didn't show up" excuse doesn't wash with me. Any sold tickets have to be declared on the attendance for the purposes of HMRC. That's why you can see football grounds with shedloads of empty seats have a sell-out attendance declared.

We may have gone against the grain, like, and declared an actual attendance as well as giving the full number of tickets sold to HMRC. But it would be highly unusual.

Sorry if this has been said in the thread already but on BBC Manchester Matty Smith said 8000 had been sold by Thursday. When I was picking up my season ticket just before kick off I could see at least 100 season tickets not picked up. If you were coming from further afield than Salford (like my dad) it made sense to watch on sky rather than get on the M60. So maybe they announced the people in the stadium not tickets sold. It took me 2 ½ hours to do a 40 min journey, so well done to the people that did turn up especially those coming over the Pennines.

This is a good point. I've been squashed like a sardine in the midst of huge attendances during the era of winter rugby (Wigan, Saints, Widnes etc.). Barring an impenetrable blizzard or very high winds the weather was never an issue (I refuse to believe the conditions were worse than what you regularly encountered at grounds such as Watersheddings, Thrum Hall and even Cougar Park).

I accept that a few fans were probably put off. But to be thousands down for the opening game at a new stadium suggests the people charged with running the club dropped the ball.

don't forget we are going back 15 years or more a lot of people who watch rugby league might not have been going in the winter and are summer fans. I know how cold it used to be playing up in Oldham in the late 70's and early 80's but we also had caning in the past as well, our new breed of fan will want the comforts of home and snow and cold don't make it a nice experience.

I know the attendance given at the game wasn't the true figure for a fact! I phoned the club shop today about my season ticket having the wrong seat number on it and apparently hundreds of season ticket holders seats were double sold, the guy in the shop said when they sold seats to season ticket to be holders they marked off the seat numbers so they could not be asked for again, they thought it was all under control until countless people had to be moved into spare seating as the stadium ticket office didn't take any notice of the marked off seat numbers sold to season ticket holders.
Makes you wonder what the actual attendance was?

Your turnstiles will be electronically counted, so any ' double ' sales wouldnt make any difference , 4,000 odd with probably your corporate sales all hiding in the bar

15 years is not THAT long of a time. I accept that many new fans will have replaced some of the older ones since then. But a good proportion of those "veterans" will still be around. In any case - I'm not entirely convinced by the idea that supporters gathered over the past decade are somehow soft. Why should a match that was appealing, say, ten years ago be any less appealing today? And let's be honest - the opening match to a new season in a brand new stadium is about as appealing as it gets.

15 years is 3X5 : as a rule of thumb, society changes by a great deal every 5 years. Therefore it is a long time. Think of what were common activities 10 years ago: remember videos, pubs, going to sports (outside football). Not Sky+, supermarker beer at home, and wall - to - wall sports on demand in the home.
Disagree: basing any marketing for a fringe sport, such as Rugby League, on what would have been acceptable 5/10/15 years ago is doomed.

EXACTLY!

2009 = 3,487
2010 = 3,130
2011 = 3,587
Best Crowd against Castleford for 4 years and in atrocious weather.....I would hold judgement on the "crowd issue" until at least 3 more games.....before kicking off about the marketing dept. Hull FC (3,983),us cock-er-nees (3,065) and Leeds (4,024) will be a better gague of where you are.....14,659 in 2011 for your first 4 home games...only 9,417 more to equal that. I reckon you'll be close to 20% up by the time you play Wigan.
Good luck for the rest of the season......

I'm with you on that GF. A warm summers day would've probably doubled the crowd so as disappointed as I am by the low turnout, I'll hold off on judgment for a few weeks. Oh & while we're on the subject of fans, for want of a better word, being "softer" these days, I agree 100%. I never thought I'd join the "when I was a lad" brigade at the age of 34 but I can't believe what a bunch of mard ar$e$ society have become. Professional footballers wearing tights, gloves & snoods, my U15's team turning up for training in ear muffs & bobble hats, it's embarrassing!

I even had one lad admit to missing training last week "because it was raining"!

. Get the wintergreen out & man up FFS!