Fulham have just sent me £71 – Funny old game | OneFootball

What a strange few days. Last week I received an email from Fulham FC, telling me tickets were on general sale and inviting me to Craven Cottage for the match against Newcastle United.

As with thousands of our fans, I have no prospect of securing a place in the away section of Premier League grounds. Which is a bit of a sore point, because there are 10 (ten) top-flight stadiums no more than two hours from Chez Ritter in West Sussex. Oh, lucky man.

My previous visit to Fulham was for the FA Cup tie in January, when my daughter Jo and I sat among the home supporters in the Hammersmith End.

I bought the tickets online from the official box office, which was clearly struggling to get backsides on seats, even though they cost “only” £40 each.

Ever since, FFC (not to be confused with FFS) have bombarded me with emails; the joys of online shopping . . .

I logged on last Thursday, looked at the stadium map and decided I could just about stomach the £71 cost of the cheapest seat, in almost exactly the same place I had been eight months earlier.

On that occasion, the home supporters spent some considerable time telling me how sick they were with the current Fulham owners, who were charging north of £100 for the privilege of sitting in the new Riverside stand for any old Premier League match.

Remember, FFC have won diddly squat in their long (some would say overlong) and undistinguished history. A big club in any sense of the word? I think not.

Even little old Wimbledon have an FA Cup in their figurative trophy cabinet.

Ticket bought, for what seemed to the only remaining seat in that end of the ground, I paid another £21.50 for an old fogy’s travel card, to cover the return rail and Tube journeys. Add refreshments on the hoof and the cost was clearly going to exceed £100.

Then lady luck intervened, in the guise of Nicola, who works for Fulham Football Club.

About 14 hours after paying £71 into the Fulham coffers, I received yet another email from them. This one was a bit different . . .

“Good afternoon Mr Ritter,

I write to you in regard to your recent booking for Fulham v Newcastle United at Craven Cottage tomorrow.

Following a recent post on social media and a review of your purchase history with the Club, we have reason to believe that you are a visiting supporter.

Tickets purchased through Fulham FC are strictly for home supporters and your ticket purchase has been cancelled and refunded in full.

Best wishes, Nicola”

I replied, acknowledging I did indeed support NUFC and explaining the only way I could attend was to buy a ticket once they went on “general sale”. They were, of course, only on “general sale” because FFC couldn’t find enough supporters to buy them (something I refrained from highlighting).

“I consider this a disgraceful decision. I have attended hundreds of matches over the years without being involved in any unsavoury incidents.

At the age of 65, I am looking forward to attending many more in my retirement. Why would I ruin that prospect by upsetting anybody else in the stadium?

Please reverse your decision. Blanket banning of visiting supporters will harm football.”

Having vented my frustration, I wondered if the email would even reach Nicola before kick-off. Time for a phone call. The box office allowed me, after six fruitless attempts, to join the queue. Twenty minutes of muzak followed before an excited voice announced I was first in line. The soporific tunes suddenly switched to London Calling, which made me even more pumped up for my chat with lady luck. The Clash. How appropriate!

Except that Nicola does not work in the box office. The charming man (they’re big on charm at Craven Cottage, as you might have seen from recent news headlines) who picked up my call was happy to give me her direct line.

Success at last! Nicola is a terribly polite employee, although she can be a little careless with her words. When I asked why I had been blackballed, she said: “You’re a self-confessed Newcastle fan…”

Cue first protest. The last time I checked, a confession must follow an offence. And while I cannot dispute the act of supporting Newcastle United is often bordering on the insane, it is not a crime. She then changed “confessed” to “you admit you’re a Newcastle fan”, which is like calling a spade a shovel. I do not admit, I acknowledge.

Nicola then suggested I might cause unrest by sitting amid the home fans, a claim that ignored the evidence of the trouble-free visit in January.

IMAGO/Action Plus

An old codger with a cardiac stent? Should I have been flattered?

Probably not, because when I rejected that argument, she latched onto my medical history to say I was putting myself at risk of attack from FFC’s own supporters.

I felt duty-bound to say the Fulham fans I had encountered over the years were in no way aggressive or threatening. They were universally cordial. “Some of our supporters are,” she agreed. Talk about damning with faint praise. The default position was clearly “football fans are incapable of behaving reasonably”.

IMAGO/Pro Sports Images

She denied holding that view, of course, just as she denied her club would love to see a return to the good old 1980s, when Luton Town banned all away supporters.

Silly me for thinking we lived in a more tolerant millennium, that football had moved on from the violence that besmirched the beautiful game decades ago.

Nicola said every Premier League club followed the same rules. “We would never knowingly sell a ticket in the home sections to an away fan,” she said.

The “why” question met the usual response: because those are the rules.

“Would you be happier for the seat to be unsold than occupied by a visiting supporter?”

“Yes.”

So that appears to be that. I forgot to ask for details of “the recent post on social media”. Do FFC trawl the fertile acres of BBC Sport online to find my name in HYS comments? Do they Google yours truly or type “Newcastle Simon Ritter” into a search engine? What a sad world we seem to inhabit.

There is a glimmer of hope that my days of attending top-flight football might resume some time soon. The word “knowingly”. I’ll get by with a little help from my friends… or at least the friends of friends, who have season tickets with several clubs within easy travelling distance. When such tickets are used to buy additional seats, the recipients are not subject to internet searches, ticket-purchase checks or blanket bans (woe betide any NUFC fans with a postcode north of the Trent if they want to watch their team in London from the “wrong” part of the ground).

Or I could try a pseudonym. Kenton Banks? Lewis Twitten? The possibilities are endless.

You might ask why I spent so long on the phone to Nicola, who made clear in her email and immediately we started our cosy little chat that she was a lady not for turning.

Well, she had a charming Scots accent and was politeness personified. I had to insist more than once she called me “Simon” rather than the less friendly “Mr Ritter.”

And, when all’s said and done, she did save me about £90 of grief. Listening to Razor and Ando on BBC Radio Newcastle during that first half was bad enough. Paying dearly for the privilege of watching it would have been far, far worse.