What A Load Of Ballots!

 Tickets for the FA Cup final against Chelsea have been on sale this week and unfortunately I have missed out. The allocation of approximately 25,000 seats wasn't enough to cater for every Liverpool fan who has been to all of our FA Cup ties this season, which is a real testament to the loyalty of our support. Quite rightly season ticket holders who had been to all five of our FA Cup games were guaranteed a ticket, leaving the members and fan card holders who had also attended every match to be drawn out of a ballot for the honour of buying a ticket for the showpiece game at Wembley. I've bought a ticket for every round so far on my fancard along with my brother on his card but we weren't offered the chance to enter the ballot together. He was drawn out and I wasn't, but there's no point only one of us travelling to London. The cost and the fact that you're sat with complete strangers (albeit with a common interest) made it a non starter. I'm sure there will be plenty more people in the same situation as us which leads fans to one of two choices. Either simply don't buy your ticket, making life harder for our ticket office, or buy the ticket and sell it on at a profit which isn't exactly ethical but the way the ballot was set up has brought this on. We decided to simply not buy the ticket but the temptation to cash in had been there though in the end it wasn't the right thing to do. I'm sure some of the people who weren't originally chosen during the ballot will be contacted in the coming days as a few tickets will remain unsold so there is still hope for some of the disappointed.

 While the ballot could have been set up in a more helpful way, the real problem lies with the number of tickets the FA supplies to each participating club. For the semi finals it was around 32,000 tickets per club, and for the final this drops by about 7000 despite the capacity of the stadium remaining the same. 25,000 tickets each for Liverpool and Chelsea still leaves approximately 40,000 tickets for the FA to distribute how it sees fit. There's no denying that there are people who work within all levels of football who deserve to attend a game like this and I wouldn't want them to miss out either, but it's also a fact the both Liverpool and Everton fans travelled in huge numbers an unnecessarily long distance to attend a game at Wembley to help the FA pay for their own over budget stadium when the game could have been played in Manchester. The thanks they get? Thank you for coming but you can't all come back. Very nice. I'm not a fan of the FA and alot of the decisions it makes and to be honest I don't really see them redeeming themselves any time soon.