How much for an afternoon of family fun ?!?

No party without fireworks!

After a few hot baths and plenty of pain relief I seem to have survived and recovered from the triathlon. I have to admit I had a good time, well worth the 50 euros to enter. Yes I know I spent money to torture myself but the feeling of crossing that line was amazing. Not bad on the back of a few weeks of partying!

This weekends P n B comes from last weeks. 6th October 2012, that saw Rovers AGAIN loses a last minute goal to allow the opposition snatch a point!

Hope you enjoy this more than the past few results!

Paella and Bovril

The past few weeks Barcelona have been locked into “fiesta” mode. La Mercè is the big one! The whole city centre turns into one big festival site, stages pop up in parks and on corners of streets, plazas turn into giant tapas bars and wine tents, Barcelona likes to party and party it does, especially with the current crisis, everyone, it seemed, was out for their wee bit of free diversion.  Every year it amazes me how all this can be done for free, of course this year you could see the cut corners and the pinched pennies, but still, over the 4 days the city was full of fun that all the family could be taken to with no worries about the cost, not bad for a country in crisis.

Football is, I think, a kind of show, a live sport performance on the grassy green stage of a pitch. Whether you watch it “live” on tv or from a freezing plastic seat, I believe that you should feel that you have been entertained, at least just a little, even if it is only that the programme made you giggle, you should leave a game with a smile about one thing. But what if you pay out big bucks; does this mean more spectacle?  I was unpleasantly shocked, but not surprised, that a recent Arsenal V Chelsea match had a minimum wallet-crunching entry price of £62. I did not even look up at what the top price ticket was, too scared! Yes, of course I understand that these two are “big” clubs and it was a derby match, but did that make it better game to watch, would it guarantee plenty of thrills, spills and goals? 

The last time I paid top dollar for a ticket I was getting to see AC/DC. The setting was the Olympic stadium on a warm June night and the length of the show was going to be at least 3 hours. Short of a power failure, enjoyment was on the cards! And enjoy I did, I mean come on who couldn’t love a Rosie doll, with shoes big enough to sleep in, riding onto stage on the back of a enormous black steam engine! Well worth the 70-odd Euros that the ticket cost me, but then I was pretty sure the result would go my way! 99.999% of fans left that gig happy, can the same be said for those Arsenal and Chelsea fans after Chelsea’s 2-1 victory?

True, it is a rare occasion when both sets of fans leave a game having had a good day, but should the supporters leave feeling that they have been taken advantage of? Maybe because the mega-clubs “believe” that their fans will pay whatever to see their team, but are they happier than you at 4:45?  Just think, for 1 Arsenal v Chelsea you can get 3.6 Rovers home games. I might be biased but I would take Rovers every time!