‘A mixed week both on and off the pitch’

The more eagle-eyed of you would have noticed that I recently starting sharing this weekly Bristol City blog with two other avid supporters, Joe and Stan. Joe and Stan are the good people behind the excellent Bristol City podcast One Stream in Bristol. If podcasts are your thing, I suggest you check it out.

The club have had a mixed week both on and off the pitch over the last seven days. Last week saw the return of the free flowing football that has seen us unexpectedly into the play-off places this season with the 4-0 victory over Sheffield Wednesday.

The movement, interchanging play and creativity was back and, as Johnson correctly said, City had their mojo back. Bobby Reid starred with a hat-trick performance, which will no doubt further raise the attention of potential suitors from teams in the upper-echelons of the game.

All the good work against Wednesday came some what unstuck as we lost away to fellow play-off contenders Preston mid-week. The game was a frustrating one for the fans, because although we certainly didn’t play badly, we were some way off the high standards we had reached just four days previously at Ashton Gate.

Worryingly for City, Aden Flint saw red after reacting badly to provocation from former teammate Greg Cunningham, and will now miss City’s next three games. Given that Joe Bryan picked up his tenth yellow of the season, Johnson now has a selection headache for the coming weeks.

I think most fans would like to see Lloyd Kelly given a couple of games as left-back to fill in for Joe Bryan. Kelly has shown much promise in the brief glimpses we have seen of him in the first team and is much talked about as being a star of the future.

Flint will arguably be the more missed of the two, but – and it’s a big but, judging by fitness reports – as long as Baker is back City do at least have a number of options in that centre-back position. I feel Wright and Baker could work well together with Pisano, who excelled against Sheffield Wednesday in my view, slotting in as right-back.

One player that seems to be irking fans more than I have seen for some time is Lois Diony, our French loanee striker. I concur with the masses that his performances have been some way off what we, and I am sure the management team, have been expecting, but I would like to try and offer fans some hope on this matter.

Firstly, he’s only played a handful of games for us and is yet to complete a full 90-minutes for his new side. Secondly, he has joined us at our lowest ebb of the season so far. Thirdly, not all players hit the ground running. You only have to cast an eye across our current starting XI to find a player or two that didn’t impress from day one. Pack, and even Flint, I am thinking of you.

He has no doubt been a decent player at some stage of his career and we clearly need everyone pulling in the right direction, going into the last ten games of the campaign. So please, dear City fans, let’s give Diony a chance. He can’t be any worse than the like of Kevin Nugent or Bas Savage from yesteryear.

The club also seemed to mess up the announcement – and implementation – of the season ticket purchasing system this week. Whatever your views on the price rises and so forth, the two groups that seemed most pissed off by the changes are kids and the disabled, two groups we should be going out of the way to please in my view.

I get why the club want to extend the family area and free up the lower Lansdown to potentially more lucrative ticket prices, but to not offer under-19s and under-12s tickets in this section was a mistake. Admittedly the club then changed tack, but did so by implementing price increases of around one hundred per cent with no prior dialogue with fans.

Supporters’ groups have also understandably complained at the timing of the announcement. Season ticket renewal has been done in May for the last few seasons and fans should have been given pre-warning that things would be different this season.

Again, I understand the club’s rational in bringing this period forward to try and capitalise on the fact fans may be buying a ticket for Premiership football at Championship prices – as they did ten years ago, when we were last in this position – but they way they have gone about it has been woeful.

It is a shame because the club has made great strides in recent years in both its level of professionalism and its communication with fans around such matters. On a personal note, I am happy that my season ticket in the South Stand has remained what I consider to be good value, working out at just £15 a game.