Celtic ticket services block fans from football

After one of the great cup encounters of recent years las night, Peter Lawwell might well reflect on why so few spectators managed to attend.

Just 19,258 fans turned out on the night with Gordon Strachan even speculating beforehand that the credit crunch was responsible.

But the first attention should be directed at the horrendously inept Celtic ticket services.

Perhaps they might like to compile figures as to how many fans attempted to buy tickets on the day only to be told that the only way to purchase them was to attend Celtic Park before 5PM.

Do Celtic actually want people to go to their games or not?

Every other major event staged has promoters bending over backwards to sell tickets. Football, it seems, is the only public event where you cannot purchase a ticket online or over the telephone to be collected at the venue.

How many fans missed out on the chance to go to the match because, if they were unable to turn up in the East End of Glasgow during the hours when most people work, there was no alternative? Would it really be impossible to, for example, issue some tickets in a city centre Celtic Shop and keep the outlet open until 7pm?

Why can you collect tickets for any Celtic game at the ticket centre up to kick-off but not arrange to do the same at Hampden Park?

And before the club blames, the Co-Op, the SFA, the Scottish Football League and state of the Parkhead power supply, perhaps someone would be good enough to explain what overtures were made to Hampden Park to allow fans to watch football.

From swipe cards to the infamous magic turnstiles of old, Celtic have had a reputation that would have shamed Ceauşescu’s Romania when it came to bureaucracy, dodgy practices and customer service in its ticketing department.

In recent years, far from modernising, that has got worse. There appears to exist a collective attitude that suggests some pre-season shmoozing is all that is necessary to encourage people to part with season-ticket fees and forget about them until the next July.

Well, with millions of people being forced to review their spending, Celtic better start treating its supporters as customers, rather than mugs to be put through any inconvenience for the privilege of paying a grossly inflated ticket price.

Season ticket sales slowed over the past year and season 2009/10 may well see those occasional supporters taking on a new significance. The club would do well to be more professional, courteous and accommodating.





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BBC wrecks all-time classic – and almost affects the outcome

Celtic 0 - 0 Dundee Utd
(Celtic win 11-10 on penalties)

What can you say after a cup semi-final is settled 11-10 on penalties?

Firstly, you can congratulate two teams on a classic football encounter, praise the players for their nerve and sincerely commiserate with Dundee Utd, particularly their two players who missed penalties. The Terrors produced an outstanding performance and their level of professionalism under the extreme pressure of a penalty shoot-out on live television should be commended by all.

For many years United have represented all that is best in Scottish football, in recent times under the governance of the late Eddie Thompson, and today’s side is bettered as a football team only by the Scottish champions. This is the best United side since the heyday of Jim Mclean and they should be challenging far more strongly for the second place in the SPL table that their ability fully merits.

Without a doubt, Willo Flood and Lee Wilkie will be agonising over their penalty misses but we have seen many truly great players miss on these occasions and the two players would do well to spend more time reflecting on their performances, which let none of their supporters down.

Both sides produced some excellent football and, however incredible, two sides who sought to attack at every opportunity failed to score in 120 minutes of open play yet could hardly miss when the tension was at its height.

Add to that the spectacle of Scotland’s two best goalkeepers, close friends, Polish compatriots and soon-to-be club-mates facing each other from the spot and scoring – with Artur Boruc’s deftly floated strike the most audacious spot-kick since Panenka.

Yet for all this, someone, somewhere was contriving to spoil the occasion.

The BBC – the world’s oldest broadcaster, allegedly most respected, and one of the few that demands payment on pain of criminal proceedings – managed to wreck one of the great encounters Scottish football has seen in decades.

This was incompetence on a grand scale, for sure, but it also reflected policy that was contemptuous of the Scottish TV licence-payer.

It is irritating at the best of times when viewers are forced to “turn over to BBC2” to see the entirety of a game. But the BBC really went the extra mile in ruining a great night of football – in bending over backwards to prioritise its national schedules, the BBC managed to contrive the first change while play was going on.

Presumably, nobody at the corporation either understands the potential for cup semi-finals to go to extra time and penalties or recognises the fact that matches can turn in the time it takes for someone to reach for the remote control.

That was bad – but Auntie (presumably so-called because it knows nothing about football and doesn’t understand that distracting people while they are trying to watch a game isn’t cool) wasn’t finished. After Lee Wilkie’s penalty miss (the first in 19) gave Glenn Loovens the opportunity to win the tie, the Beeb actually managed to change the broadcast again while Loovens hovered over the spot.

Curiously, this coincided with referee Callum Murray delaying Loovens’s attempt to take the penalty. At the time, that looked to be outrageous interference – it is a well-known tactic of gamesmanship when trying to put a player off his penalty. Not totally unsurprisingly Loovens missed.

However, there is a serious question to be asked. Was Murray instructed to delay Loovens to accommodate a second channel switch by our inept national public broadcaster? If so, the incompetence of the BBC very nearly materially affected the outcome of the match. That can never be allowed to happen again.

Aside from those very real suspicions (which if unfounded would strongly call Murray’s actions into question), the public have been let down by a corporation that clearly sees Scottish viewers as being less important than its current affairs schedule.

The least the BBC can do is publicly apologise and re-broadcast the match for those whose attempts to record it on Sky+ were ruined. This, however, will do nothing to compensate for ruining viewers’ enjoyment of the game.

In the light of this latest debacle, it is perhaps just as well that there is now so little live sport on the BBC Scotland. The corporation clearly lacks the professionalism to be trusted with the game of football.

• BBC Complaints
  

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