Thursday Round-Up

With pre-season officially just days away the excitement is building in preparation for the new season. The Blue Square Premier fixtures will be released at the back end of next week and by then Graham Westley’s squad will have already been through a couple of tough days of fitness training.

Westley mentioned that pre-season training will start for Boro on Sunday, but that a lot of the players had been keeping themselves fit over the summer to give them a head start going into the busy pre-season schedule. An example was Andy Drury, who apparently has been in the gym and training four times a week since the end of last season. It’s great that even when the players have time off, they’re pushing themselves to keep fit so they can ‘hit the ground running’ for when August comes around.

A bit of news from the club that has been released this week is that 8 league games next season will be listed as premium fixtures and therefore will cost supporters a £1 extra to get in. I assume that this is the club’s response to losing the Setanta money after the Irish broadcaster went into administration earlier in the week. In some ways I’m not surprised that Boro have upped the admission prices for these games as the expected £75,000 a year loss is bound to hurt the club’s finances for next season. Also, it seems that they are now following suit with the rest of the Blue Square Premier and charging more for higher profile fixtures. I remember turning up in the pooring rain last September at Rockingham Road to notice that I would have to pay an extra £1 because Stevenage was listed as a premium fixture. Here is the list of the fixtures next season that you’ll have to pay a £1 more to see next season;

AFC Wimbledon, Oxford, Cambridge, Rushden, Wrexham, Luton, Mansfield and Kidderminster.

I don’t really understand why the Kidderminster game has been selected to be honest. I thought Kettering would of been more likely to bring more support to Broadhall Way and therefore more money than Harriers, who I think will struggle a bit next season. The others are fairly logical based on what away support they’ll bring to Hertfordshire.

The same article also confirmed that the club will wear a new home kit next season. It’s been rumoured for a while that the club were going to replace the predominantly white strip, which the team wore at Wembley in their FA Trophy triumph, but it’s now been confirmed and the first pictures of it will be released some time in July, ready for supporters to purchase it by the time of the opening day of the season. It’s still unknown whether the kit will be going back to stripes or be similar to the design of last years kit, which to be fair grew on me as the season went on.