My Review of Leicester City Football Club

This is something a little bit different than usual.  I could have written a letter as you will see in due course, but i couldn’t work out who i should write to.  So instead I’m putting a out a brief review of the club following my recent trip to the City.

At Easter i like to treat my lad to a little city break for a few night to see a different city, a few attractions and include some live football. After noting that in Leicester there is the National Space Centre i opted for Leicester, incidently i got in the car and drove down to Coventry to pop in the Transport Museum too.  Both fantastic attractions.

I may as well go into my main annoyance straight away. When debating where to go i weighed up the possible options on the fixtures list of the clubs that had made my short list for a possible trip. I think i considered Norwich, Man City and Wolves but in the end i opted for Leicester as id never been to the City before. So i bought the tickets for the Leicester vs Birmingham scheduled for Saturday afternoon kick off. Surprisingly the tickets were available for purchase months in advance. I actually received the paper tickets in the post 2 months before the fixture. You know where this is going. The game was rescheduled to the Friday night due to Sky TV. I’ve actually read some articles from City fans annoyed by the amount of games rescheduled due to TV this season, seems crazy but is not relevant to my point. The trip was planned for Thursday to Sunday. So on the Wednesday i was looking at the Sky TV website to see what games they were showing on the Sunday to see if there was anything worth getting back for on the Sunday. this is when i noticed that the game was live on Friday night!! I then went to the clubs website to confirm this and the fixture list did just that. I was annoyed as i wanted the game as a day time activity. Oh well.

I thought about this for a while and thought how did i not know the fixture had been rescheduled. If i complained to the club I’m sure they would merely say that all bookings are subject to change due to TV and you should monitor the clubs website for any changes. Fair enough i can accept this. But… would it have harmed anyone to send out an email stating that a change had occurred? nope. Would it have been easy? of course. Simple customer service. At the time i looked on the Leicester City website and went through their news feed and could not find anything that related to the rescheduling of the fixture. That is poor in my book. Yeah most people going to the game would have been aware of the change as ‘fans’ but hey in a world where we get hundreds of spam emails would it have hurt to get an email about it. I’m sure i will get regular emails ‘as a previous customer’ from the club trying to push their tickets. Anyway.

We got the stadium, relatively easy to find, especially at game time due to all the fans walking in. We picked up a burger from the van and got told off for pushing in (didn’t realise there was mile long que on the other side). Over heard some one say that this van does the best burgers ever. Slightly OTT, but better than the grub i had outside the Madjeski earlier in the season that gave me the s**ts!! There’s a large superstore that sells all kinds of toot as you would imagine, but what they do not sell are small magnets, they have huge photo magnets, but not small club ones. Sort it out.

Inside the ground you go through the ticket scanners to get to the main area. Once inside i asked a geriatric steward to show us where to go. Pointless exercises. Toilets are decent, more cubicles in there than the ones at Wembley. The ground itself is very modern and unexciting, but fit for purpose. We sat in the family enclosure. On every seat there were 2 respect campaign blow up sticks. The kids can bang together to create noise. Good idea, effing annoying in reality. Especially when your getting banged all over the gaff by them. A kid behind me kept knocking me but when i looked round to say something to his dad the fella looked at me with an expression that said ‘unlucky’, cheers mate. Second half i had to actually highlight to some kid that he had hit me in the face 3 times. I thought he was going to cry. Am i a bad person?

Brief commentary on the game. Not a fantastic game. 4 goals though. Leicester threw it away in the dying seconds for a penalty, but on the flip side only managed to score from corners.  No one really stood out but the Birmingham midfield did look lively at times.  As always i look out for what the ‘fans’ are up to.  One chap caught my eye. Turned up 20 mins late with 2 kids had a barny with someone for sitting in his season ticket seat.  Then proceeded to chant the sole unimaginative phrase ‘cmon city’ not very loudly and at intervals of about 60 seconds throughout the whole game.  Generally the atmosphere was OK, was not a full house but to be expected with TV games.

All in all it was an OK trip.  I would go again.