Old habits die hard

Another two home points frittered away,

.

And there was me thinking that the days of conceding late, frustrating, point-dropping and confidence-sapping goals followed Jimmy Mullen out of the Banks's.

Irritatingly this also extends the Banks's drought to one win in the last eleven competitive home fixtures and kind of makes the summer 'Back to the Fortress' campaign look somewhat silly at present.

There was however some fantastic news on the attendance front this week as the club managed to increase numbers through the home turnstiles beyond the 3000 mark.

True, it was only 29 paying punters over the 3000 but when your attempts at increasing numbers are as hopelessly unsuccessful as ours sometimes you need to pat yourselves on the back after an improvement.

Indeed, by my rough calculations and taking Roy's passionate rallying cry from a couple of weeks back, Saturday's attendance growth should boost Chris Hutchings's playing budget by the best part of £200!

Should the club manage similar growth between now and Christmas, then you never know, it might just be enough to provide the manager with a January war chest boosted by almost a grand. Personally I'm guessing that Alan Buckley's transfer record may still be in place post the January window but with crowd numbers booming you never know.

Joking aside, I would like to congratulate the club on a bit of almost out of the box thinking in offering Walsall Housing Group tenants the opportunity to purchase 2 tickets for a tenner (or 4 for £20) for the Exeter home game a week on Saturday.

As sponsors of the youth team, centre of excellence and match sponsors for the Exeter fixture WHG clearly are one of the Club's prime commercial partners. Indeed given that WHG are apparently the town's largest landlord, housing over 40,000 people, Roy and his pals are dead right in looking to make inroads into convincing the organisation's vast number of tenants that every other Saturday afternoon on Bescot Crescent isn't quite as miserable as one win in eleven fixtures might suggest.

Personally, I've always thought that football attending is a habit that becomes addictive over time. Friends meet up at football, have a beer and a chat and then go their separate ways, fourteen days later they repeat the day and a fortnight later they'll do it again.

The more times they go, the more likely it is that they will go to the next game.

For this reason I've never been a fan of one-off deals, or single match deals or vouchers.

Similarly the probability of convincing a new fan to invest in a discounted, yet still expensive, book of five or ten tickets on his first or second visit to the Stadium is also pretty remote and for this reason I wish the club would look to adopt a policy of dripping offers through.

That they follow up their original two for £10 promotion with a further enticement on the back of that particular ticket and then follow whatever that offer is up. Eventually, as they have found to their cost with non attendance, attending football becomes the habit that Chris Hutchings' budget needs it to be.

Gents, yet another promising start. Now please don't follow old form and fail to follow this offer up. Too many half hearted attempts have floundered to allow another decent idea to fail and for the sake of the manager's budget you need to get one of these ideas right.