Dismal day at The Hive

Ninety minutes into the season and already the word calamity is ringing around The Hive London. Well, not if you’re into weddings in a big way but the football is what we’re here for.

Circumstances dictate I can’t attend home games until the fixture list switches itself around, but I was there on Tuesday morning, invited up by Victoria Barlow who has marketing, ticketing and commercial under her umbrella.

Now please correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t recall seeing news of her appointment nor yet have I seen anything describing who our new media man is, I know his name is Howard and was interviewed by Victoria and the excellent departing Adam Rowe, I don’t doubt in time if he’s half as good as Adam then it’s another asset for the club and could we do with some of those.

Having to rely on Twitter for updates and Soccer Saturday alongside isn’t ideal but needs must. But, what unfolded before, during and after the game and upon reading the Only Barnet message board on Sunday evening honestly looks like 24 hours of a horror story.

It began before the game started, Charlie Cassen arriving to celebrate his birthday (happy belated birthday mate!) with a few beers watching the early Premier League kick off, only to find out the TV weren’t working and nor were their nozzles to pour the draught beer, bizarre when the two go hand in hand really.

Now bearing in mind there were two home games at the very end of May, there has been 11 weeks to have a ‘dry run’ ready for Saturday afternoon and by all accounts it failed miserably. The TV’s did finally get turned on but the beer didn’t get poured so I read.

Short staffed was again an issue inside Legends, beer fridges almost empty and no hot water to make tea and coffee in the tea hut, all in all things were going well then!

Then we had the issue of the match itself. Despite a goal-less first 45, County seemed to edge it and the less said about the second the better. Worrying how the team appeared to capitulate and fold very quickly and having seen the goals conceded it was like rewinding 12 months, County I do expect to be in the mix of course but I wasn’t expecting a 0-5 thumping.

And then to finish the day off you couldn’t get a car park token to exit from the Hive bar having to walk back round to Legends to get one, something else not communicated.

Really not the customer experience from start to finish and a lack of application on the pitch after half time and this was something I touched on last week when I went up to The Hive, the former is something Victoria is big on so now we’ll see what can be done to deliver that.

To cap it all there was a wedding I believe underneath the North Stand meaning no fantastic bar for County fans to use, and given they brought a magnificent support to the game they deserved better as well.

This all goes to show that while over the summer the recruitment on the pitch has been more professional than last year which in all honesty wasn’t hard, but off the pitch it can look and feel decidedly amateur, some of this stuff above is the mere basics you would expect at a Step 5 club, Barnet need to get this right.

There’s just seven days until the next home game and I would expect a lot of these issues to not rear their ugly head again, I’m still undecided if I go on Monday, plenty of people I would like to see having not been able to encounter them in well over a year.

I did say also last Tuesday I will criticise when we are poor but I will praise when we are good, this has many lessons to be learnt and needs to 100x better in seven days’ time or that goodwill built up over a decent pre-season won’t just evaporate on the pitch, there won’t be much left watching it off the pitch.