Olé

Away ticket office is right next to turnstiles. Although good luck getting to the ground ?.

Serious question. Producing a version for blind people and then charging them a fiver extra for the shirt, isn't that a clear and obvious breach of the equalities act? It's a wonderful gesture to bring attention to this cause but to be clear while there is no obligation for a replica shirt to cater to the visually impaired, once you've done so charging extra for access to it would seem to be in breach of Sections 15, 19 and no doubt others in the Equalities Act (2010). It would be very sad if this PR backfires.

DarkSky (now part of Apple Weather) is remarkably accurate localised forecasting. As recently as an hour ago it was showing rain until nearly 5pm - it's just updated to show nothing after midday at AG.

Hey Mihai I may be in Romania in the Autumn due to work. I have been to Bucharest, Cluj and Iaci before a few times (and Chisinau with an Ivan Testimitanu City shirt ?) - if I can arrange anything for you or get you anything please let me know. I have a signed shirt from the Danny Wilson era (early 2000s) if you have really followed Bristol City for 40 years I will get it to you. ??

It's definitely more appropriate to appoint a wonderful human being from within when they've actually had the opportunity to learn from someone with 25 years of managerial experience rather than 2.5.

I've got far more important things to be asking it

I don't think we have much to fear from Artificial Intelligence My personal favourite. The reference to IFK Göteborg is sublime. You can really go down the rabbit hole with ChatGPT trying to find out what data it is looking at to think all these things (and more) are facts. If you ask it, it will even give you real links to reliable football sites like Transfermarkt or Wikipedia where it thinks it has learned these things - only the links relate to completely obscure alternative footballers. In some cases it will just start making up footballers that sound realistic and have a realistic back story but are completely concocted. Eventually it apologises profusely when it cannot provide any real evidence for example of Callum O'Dowda being Indonesian. I thought one reliable feature of AI was it is self-learning. But ask it any number of questions about example footballers from Bristol City and it will keep on doing this. Example - ask it to name a Bristol City player who has played in Serie A. I would have hoped it might figure out Eros Pisano, Adam Nagy, and Milan Djuric. Instead it told me Nahki Wells played for Udinese. Example - ask it to name a Bristol City player who has played in the MLS. It might have found enough data to point out Bradley Orr. Nope, it told me that Andreas Weimann currently plays for FC Cincinnati. https://chat.openai.com/

I'm trying to find out what is going on. I don't understand how a strike is exactly 2 hours before and after, we sure this isn't a trolll account? If London Bridge to South Bermondsey ever gets shut get train from London Bridge to New Cross Gate or for much more frequent get a tube to Canada Water then Overground down to Surrey Quays (where it kicked off with Everton) or New Cross Gate again walkable from both. With the Elizabeth Line I actually think the fastest way to the Den is now Paddington to Whitechapel change to Overground. No "cowards way" but best part or London ?

I posted in another thread about their chairman passing away. They are going to put home fans in both tiers of away end (normally 100% away) due to demand for the memorial. Source: @JerrySLO @ living right by their pub (taken now Thursday at 2320)

O’Neils have jumped on the Ajax bandwagon with a Bob Marley shirt for Bohemians FC in Dublin and it’s exactly as bad as you might think it would be. A low quality print on a basic white shirt like you might find down a market. This is why our shirts look awful - they are literally just a factory with no designers and it shows. The reason Hummel works so well is they had someone artistic who transforms ideas with detailed patterns and design touches. Three stripes and a Microsoft Paint low res bitmap outline of the great man himself straight into production is a good example of a nice concept executed by amateurs with basic tools and zero detail. Perfect Jon Lansdown territory.

Jesus effing christ I hadn't seen that section. This has finished me off now. Clipart we're so extraordinarily proud of we made a t-shirt with it on the front AND on the back. Because you can never have too many copies of the same image. This is all totally normal behaviour. I am convinced there's some imbecile sat at Ashton Gate using desktop publishing software, beaming proudly at every basic clipart layout they can come up with like a 4 year old at the end of art class.

I was down at AG randomly last Friday and had a look at the gear. Every single item looks horribly cheap, and by every single item I mean two items and some goalkeeping tops. And this is coming from someone who once bought a Bristol Sport shirt. There's honestly a 10th tier club that plays in a park down the road from me with more and better gear. Don't give me this O'Neils make proper kits. Ebay fakes have better 'Authentic' / 'Officially Licensed' badges than O'Neils one which looks like it was printed on a ZX Spectrum. Their City badge is flat and basic compared to Hummel's version which was a thing of beauty: brightly coloured, embossed text and ring, different textures in the white and red. The third shirt is comfortably the most feeble kit this club has ever produced. It would genuinely not look out of place on a beach stall and has absolutely nothing to do with us. The complete destruction of their own new branding is incredible. If I were the original designers I would completely disassociate myself with the club (one of them already did). Besides that ******* clipart, they've moved our crest to the back of the shirt at a different and largely, illegible size, and there's even a third logo, Bristol City written in a scrawl. There are some absolute lunatics at the club who really haven't got a clue what they're doing. And checking online I see that our "training gear" consists of three pairs of gloves. Ladies and gentlemen we're a Championship club with turnover of £30m and aspirations to play in the Premier League and between us and O'Neils our sportswear line is gloves.

Jerry (SLO) mentioned City can't put the away tickets on sale yet because Millwall are anticipating a bigger crowd because of the memorial and may want to open the lower tier or even half the upper tier to home fans.

Same @New2City - I can 100% get you one if you need it, I always have a few linked ST accounts from friends who don't travel away. Just message me before they go on sale if you need one. There have been times in the past where South Wales Police have considered making City fans travel via Alaska to collect their tickets for this fixture prior to joining the 4,434 mile police escort.

Interlocking or intertwined initials was always common place historically in sports team shirts in many countries including UK (Rangers, Leeds, Birmingham, Dundee etc) and the US. Most of them, even 100 years ago, made plenty of artistic effort to combine a unique (often embellished serif font) with careful and clearly laid out interlocking of the various letters. We on the other hand have just got bored in Microsoft Word, written BCFC and set letter spacing to "very tight". If it took us more than 1 minute to make the shirt we spent too long.

A serious manufacturer would stop this stuff going to production the minute they saw the designs. They've put their label on it, they presumably want their brand to be taken seriously. As per my earlier post, there is no way O'Neills should be getting a pass here. It's a race to the bottom between them and City who actually cares less about credibility of their product.

Three possibilities 1. Printer didn't have the right font installed 2. Artwork file became corrupted 3. We no longer care **** me we don't half produce some garbage these days. And all this bollocks about O'Neils being a serious brand - a serious brand would not have just nodded and printed all this shit and put their name on it. O'Neils is obviously happy to just print whatever the park football teams and Hen Dos send it to print.

Yes - and because it was already booked under Pearson, Claudio Ranieri was announced by Leicester at the camp venue we're at, so it was where Leicester prepared for winning the Premier League. Ranieri had camp there for Leicester the following season also.

Wasn't Nigel Pearson announced the day before Middlesborough away during Covid, photographed at the local team hotel. Must be a thing up there.

Normally 00:30 although when it used to run it was quite unpredictable on timing, anything from 00:10 to 00:50. On time, in midweek, it is too late for tubes / Elizabeth line but you've got the 205 bus outside to East London 24/7. I get the 36 bus as did at least one or two other City fans in South London, which luckily for me has its final stop at the bottom of my street (gets me home by about 1.45am on a school night!)

Weirdly I spotted the same a week ago trying to fit in an urgent trip to Bristol and back on a weekday. I had let a few folks in London know but forgot to put it on OTIB. Best signing of the summer.

Great post and great question. As should now be obvious, Mark can be highly convincing to all those around him. It's too easy to call him a BS salesman because he's more measured than that and took in our VERY successful owner and kept him close and made him feel involved and can clearly articulate a narrative to explain the increasing levels of expenditure and trading. He's somewhat convincing as a businessman. One of the oddities of Mark Ashton is there's a frustrated failed footballer in there somewhere more so than actual proven businessman. He was a reserve goalkeeper who never really played. (No slight, he's done more than I can even dream of), but it means he's been playing out his career vicariously through an administrator/leadership role instead. Highly visible, highly audible, literally seeking the clichéd fame and fortune. The trouble is his only style of "play" is to go direct. Spend a lot of money, drive a change agenda, ratchet up the club. There's nothing wrong with most of this except for one crucial thing. He's not very good at it. It's a volume not value gig for him, throw enough shit at the wall. It occurred to me this is where his attempt to be the football hero he wished he was diverges. Footballers can't hide. But Mark the CEO does and will. There is no doubt he pushes clubs "forward" and that is a positive thing and owners appreciate it. But he does not do so sustainably and ultimately it's about maximising his own income and exposure (compared to say a company founder or owner who takes on risk and puts success before personal income). His own reward is his only constant. All the PR is a vehicle for that which is why he quickly goes missing when it's going badly.

Amen Dave. Fantastic summary. One of the things that makes questioning of our Mark Ashton "hate" all the more odd is the fact that 99.9% of the discussion on him on OTIB (and your response is a great example) deal only in the well known facts and provable history and actually swerve all the repeated innuendo that "explain" his way of operating. We're actually pretty tame. If we were really obsessed we'd take Ipswich chat back into questionable legal territory. We don't talk about why he pours money into players from the same agents over and over again We don't talk about related private companies that he is involved in or commission back channels We don't talk about incidents at the club requiring non disclosure and confidentiality agreements We don't care as much as we should that he courted Ipswich's US investors while working for us Bloke has gone from earning £450k a year as CEO of a Championship club to earning over £900k a year as CEO of what was a League One club. As always it's about maximising his own income most of all. There's a perfect football analogy for him. He's a "route one" businessman. Arrive, massively inflate the output of the organisation (spend more, do more, without much balance or control). Fans all get excited. Inflating what the club spends and what it trades enables him to take a larger salary as a cut of this output (and any other benefits that come his way in doing so). But ultimately someone has to pay for all this excess, and while he's around that means selling all the assets (based on his scattergun transfer record not usually assets of his own making!). But after he's gone (and made a fortune) it means the club requiring one almighty reset. When fans believe - and let's be honest we did once, and @Dom1969 is doing the same now - everyone always says what a great speaker he is. There's a reason why he does all this endless PR that no other normal football club CEO does (no seriously, they really don't and that's part of the fun of this thread). The racket above ONLY works by being right there in plain sight, grinning away, selling the storyline, giving people a vision to justify pumping endless cash into and then right back out of the club from investors. He's had incredibly little success doing this other than his income. If we're obsessed it's only that he keeps getting away with it.

Thank you - you have always been courteous and understand there is no malice beyond the self promotion of Mark Ashton. The idea we don't like Ipswich Town is proven to be wrong. The last time we hosted you we literally gave Stefan Marinovic his only ever game for us to try and keep you up. https://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/football/nz-teams/111268177/all-whites-goalkeeper-stefan-marinovic-endures-shaky-bristol-city-debut