A PREMIER LEAGUE football fan believes he has the country’s worst season ticket where he doesn’t just have an obstructed view of one goal – but has stanchions running down right between the goalposts at BOTH ends of the pitch.
Jim Daly paid over £700 for his regular seat in Premier League Crystal Palace‘s main stand.
But he often doesn’t know who has scored a goal because his blocked view of both nets means he can’t see players strike or head the ball past the keeper.
Jim said: “I appreciate it is an old stand and sometimes in them you get a restricted view of one goal – that happens, but not both goals! That’s so unfair.
“I have to bobble about forwards and backwards trying to see what’s going on when the ball is around the penalty area near the goal.
“But if someone scores I still often have to wait for somebody near me to say who it was, or I now wait to see the new sign on the opposite stand saying who the scorer was.
“When we beat Manchester United 4-0 in one of Oliver Glasner’s early games I had no idea who scored one of them until Tyrick Mitchell‘s name came up on the sign opposite.
“Sometimes I can see replays on the screen in the club’s TV studio through their window from where I sit, so that’s how I find out what happened.
“I find I’m regularly craning my neck into the lap of the person next to me.
“Occasionally if a game isn’t sold out, like maybe a midweek game against Burnley, if I’m lucky one or more of the seats either side isn’t taken.
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“So I have to bounce up and down along the row according to which side of the stanchion the ball is being passed around.”
Jim added: “A few years ago the chance of season tickets came up in the main stand for my dad, who is 78 and has supported the club since 1956, and his friend Leonard who is 84, and I wanted to be with my dad, but could only get the row behind him.
“My dad is why I started supporting Palace and it’s nice to see him every two weeks, so we got these season tickets five years ago.
“I have to put up with it. There are plans for Palace to build a new modern main stand but I fear we may be priced out of it and there’s always a concern over whether dad can go up a lot of steps.”
But Jim joked: “For many seasons when Palace weren’t doing well until last season it could be said that it was often beneficial not to see the goals.
“And at least one nice thing is I’m sat by where players’ families sometimes sit. I had Tyrick’s sister next to me once and recently I had a good chat with Kaden Rodney’s mum.”
Comedian Jim, 41, who is doing a football-themed stand-up tour from April to June highlighting such black humour events that fans have to try laughing at, said Palace’s struggles through many years had provided him with plenty of material.
But he said his routine was undermined last year when they won the FA Cup and enjoyed a 19-game unbeaten run.
Jim, who has now moved from south London to Chesham, Bucks, said: “The Palace part of my stand-up really works well when the club’s failures produce a lot of jokes.
“But after Oliver Glasner arrived it was causing problems when he kept winning and won the cup as some of the show mocking the club while we were good didn’t really work.
“But in recent weeks it’s unravelled again and people have joked to me that Glasner started the downturn since December and the series of crises since, with him saying he’s leaving and the disarray, just so that Jim has got material for his upcoming tour.
“It has certainly given new inspiration to what I’ve been writing, so it is good for me professionally, but not as a Palace fan.”
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