Fallout from The Queue: Why is sorry the hardest word for Brighton?

A prominent official involved in football once described to WAB the Albion as being “the Hyacinth Bucket of football”, desperate to be seen by the rest of the world as perfect. What Brighton fans went through to collect tickets at Charlton and the club’s response is perhaps the best example of Keeping Up Appearances we have ever seen.

First things first, let us deal with The Queue itself. The Albion reported that 900 Brighton fans needed to collect their tickets from Charlton, but presumably with some of these collections involving multiple tickets as part of group buying, the actual number of tickets being handed out was far higher.

It certainly seems as though the police had no idea what to expect. Having asked Brighton fans to relay their experiences of The Queue, one of the more intriguing aspects is that some reported being asked by officers whilst drinking around London Bridge if they had their tickets or whether they needed to collect.

The police were apparently trying to gauge numbers of how many people would actually be in The Queue at the Valley. The answer to that of course was easily more than 900, as evidenced by the fact some supporters spent longer in The Queue than Charlton 0-0 Brighton including the ill-fated penalty shootout actually lasted.

This was not a mess entirely of Brighton’s making. After all, the Albion cannot control Royal Mail. It has though been obvious for a couple of weeks that an almighty problem was brewing through the sheer number of undelivered tickets.

And if anything, the club simply added to the problems. Several supporters have told WAB they were made to collect from Charlton and show ID not because their tickets never arrived, but because the club insisted on keeping in place their scheme whereby fans are selected at random to prove who they are in attempts to prevent the loyalty points harvesting.

Quite why you would do this when you already know it is going to be carnage as more than a thousand fans need to collect is anyone’s guess. Willingly adding more people to The Queue through choice rather than necessity seems mad bordering on contempt for supporters.

One long-standing Seagulls supporter who wanted to remain anonymous wrote a very balanced piece yesterday about what the club could have done to alleviate the queue.

Options suggested included allowing collections to take place at the Amex in the days leading up to the fixture when it became clear the postal strike was causing serious problems.

Opening more collection windows at the Valley rather than funnelling everyone through a small area and the use of print at home tickets were also put forward.

The club presumably had good reasons as to why none of these were viable. Likewise, there must be a reason why ticket collections at the Valley were restricted to a two-hour window.

Based upon Brighton’s claim that 900 tickets needed collecting, to hand them out in two hours would mean working at a rate of one ticket every eight seconds. That is without taking into account that some collections involved multiple tickets.

It was essentially an impossible task, as evidenced by The Queue and numerous fans missing kick off. Nobody could fault the effort of the Albion’s staff; but they should never have been put in the position whereby they were expected to deal with 900 collections in 120 minutes.

We received numerous stories of chaos in The Queue. Fans queued for an hour, only to find out they needed to go to another area as their duplicates needed printing.

Some supporters got to the turnstiles, only to find their duplicates did not work. Inside the Jimmy Seed Stand and seats had two owners with rows oversubscribed.

There were fans who realised the carnage it was going to be and simply stayed at home. Others got to the Valley, saw The Queue and sacked it off.

Four days before Christmas in an unprecedented cost-of-living crisis and these Brighton fans were being left completely out-of-pocket. For those who missed 30 minutes or more of the football, they were not getting their full money’s worth either.

Remarkably, The Queue remained largely good natured. Thousands of football supporters queueing for an hour and half to collect their tickets on cold December evening with many outside as the game kicked off could have easily turned nasty.

Albion fans deserve a huge amount of credit for their patience and understanding regarding the situation. Which is what makes the statement released by the club after the game even more extraordinary.

The Albion’s version of events contained so many inaccurate claims compared to what Brighton fans experienced and saw with their own eyes that it might as well have been written by Boris Johnson.

“We requested that Charlton reprint tickets and then eight of our staff, who’d travelled up to the Valley, sorted and issued these from the six-windowed ticket office outside the away end from 5pm this evening.”

Not one single person who was in The Queue saw six windows open. It did not seem as though eight members of staff where there. And tickets did not start being given out at 5pm.

The statement goes onto say: “Some (Brighton fans) arrived having not requested duplicates. This resulted in those fans having to wait for tickets to be printed which took additional time.”

To try and deflect some of the blame onto fans is quite extraordinary. The club had failed to take into account the impact that Royal Mail strikes known about long in advance would have on ticket deliveries.

The measures they then put in place predictably proved to be inadequate to deal with the issue of more than 900 ticket collections needing to take place in two hours.

There was absolutely no acknowledgement of that in the statement, just of the role played by fans who had not request duplicates and the Royal Mail strikes.

What has irked Albion fans more than The Queue itself is the lack of apology from the club. That 310 word statement on what happened to Brighton supporters collecting tickets at Charlton does not contain a single sorry.

Sorry that fans had to spend 90 minutes queuing on a cold December evening. Sorry that some supporters missed kick off. Sorry that some were so inconvenienced by it all that they gave up altogether.

To say sorry does not have to mean you are at fault for something. It can be used to simply express sympathies at a situation which your fans (or customers) find themselves in.

Brighton though cannot do it. As the great Elton John once sang, sorry seems to be the hardest word. They are Hyacinth Bucket, everything they do is perfect, they never get anything wrong and that is what they have to desperately tell and show the watching world.

Those who suffered The Queue for Charlton v Brighton tickets know differently.