I went to a meeting of the South Yorkshire Police Football Supporters IAG" group. A group set up of representatives of all south Yorkshire clubs and SYP. The decision to alter the dates of the second leg were taken by the efl in discussions with the tv companies around the showing of all play off games. SYP did approach the EFL around issues of policing both games at the same time. But had no say in the changes. Expecting a possible Saturday and sunday split.
I'm reading that as syp said they couldn't both play on the same day and sky chose when to rearrange after having it dropped on them at the last minute that the long arranged dates were not possible due to the incompetence of syp They're probably a bit busy turning a blind eye to CSE to police two whole football matches on one day
Bit ott. Why incompetent? Makes sense to me and a lot more who thought the possibility of disorder could be an issue on resources. If fans behaved themselves we wouldn't even need police. The decision to make the changes was purely that of the efl and tv rights. They decided to change the dates of both and not just one. Could have changed one to the Sunday.
To be fair I can get the concerns of fans of all 4 teams converging on a similar area at the same time could be a concern, given the proximity of us & SW. Not suggesting they would deliberately do it but perhaps train stations etc?
With the new police powers, they could arrest anyone in the street on suspicion of intending to attend a football match. Edit; this is not a joke, that is how vague the new powers are and the extent to which it's now entirely up to the officer.
It begs the question why have dates ‘set’ in advance in the first place for the play-offs. It still doesn’t make sense why both fixtures were moved though
Just a thought. If we have 4 teams in South Yorkshire on an average weekend it shouldn't be unusual to deal with 2 games in one day. As only 2 teams will be playing next week then the main issue is crowd size. Surely this isn't beyond SYP to manage. If it is then as a county we must be seriously short of police resources.
Just shows how naïve the police are not going to move it to Sunday when no playoff games are being played and tv coverage all set up for prem games move 1 game to Friday then you end up league 2 having a 2 day gap between games then calls from the teams playing second it's unfair so move both keep maximum 24 hours between legs best you can expect and have coverage of each game and not having to choose which to watch, but at the end of the day they did say no to both games being on the same day just didn't have a choice in how the consequence's played out
I have to be careful when passing the police training centre for West Yorks as the they are regularly training large groups of new recruits how to use speed cameras.
Tensions will be running high on the outcome of results that's why the profile will change imo. When the fixtures were set, the worst case scenario will have been envisaged. The teams were not known re venues. Police resources are not only short. But the expense is at a cost to the ratepayers. Lots of issues to take into account. Although I do think at the Peterborough game we looked to have more than enough officers in the town before the game. I don't know if there were any Incidents. But I certainly wasn't expecting any missen. More so given the ko time. Stopped in town after the game saw 1 arrest but not football related.
Barnsley, Doncaster, Sheff 5hite, Wednesday 5hite, and Rotherham, all within South yorkshire, i'm with the one's that say it could be managed, this is an issue, an i think its been done for the t,v, Sky are now setting the standard and running the E,F,L, the Police are not to blame and i believe its out of their control. My mates a copper and he's had to change his shifs, he's happy cos now he gets extra overtime,
