Many fans, myself included, experienced delays in entering the stadium - the club asked fans to come early but many paid the price for not heeding this advice (or being unable to)
Yesterday the Swans played Rotherham, and thankfully the only goal of the game came twenty-two minutes in. If it had come in the first ten minutes, a sizeable portion of the Swans fanbase would have missed it owing to not being able to get into the stadium in time for kickoff.
I heard around seven o'clock (when I finish work) that there was a queue going to the club shop, but that didn't sound too bad. By the time I made it to the stadium, however, the queue stretched the entire length of the West Stand. After a while waiting an announcement was made over tannoys stating kickoff would be delayed ten minutes, but it was fairly obvious to most queueing that this wouldn't be enough to stop us missing the start of the match.
As people continued to arrive this meant the queue didn't seem to go down for a while, and my friend has a timestamped photo from 7:52 showing the queue still stretching past the West Stand reception. Hardly ideal! I am firmly aware that the club have continued to implore people to get down to the stadium early, but the problem didn't seem to be the new ticketing system, it seemed to be the ticket office's ability to cope with the amount of tickets being demanded.
Whether this was an oversight on behalf of the ticket office supremo we can't say, but if they didn't anticipate a rush in the buildup to kickoff that does seem a little naive. Especially if there'd been a queue for a good while leading up to the game. It wasn't until Leigh Dineen - our Vice Chairman - got on the case that things got sorted. The collections pickup point - a little demountable opposite the ticket office which was doing very little as people seemed to have foregone the option of pre-booking - became a cash sale point, and all of a sudden the queue was moving briskly.
My main question would be why did Leigh Dineen have to get involved? Surely that's the job of whoever is running the ticket office, and letting it get to that stage is unacceptable? Don't get me wrong I think it's brilliant that our board are this involved (and that Leigh's initiative got me into the ground a lot quicker than I otherwise would have!), but realistically that's not his job and I'm sure that the club are were as unhappy as the fans about the delays in entry to the stadium.
I'm sure this weekend will run even more smoothly than the Burnley game, as most people have season tickets. Like the Villarreal game, it appears the all-ticket nature of the game was the problem last night, and this is something we now have a while to work on to put it right. As I've said before, I have every confidence in the board and you can bet your bottom dollar that this'll be top of the agenda when they sit down to discuss things which need sorting until the system is running better than ever.