Welcome to the first Support Your Local Saturday thread - which we will be trialling for the first time today.

The premise is a thread to talk about your local team - something of an amalgamation of the Saturday Non-PL Daily Discussion Thread, and a “match-going fan” thread.

This does not necessarily mean that only comments from fans going to their local that day - but the spirit is a Discussion Thread for people who support their local team, and especially teams from lower or non-PL leagues - who can get drowned out in the pre-existing Daily Discussion Thread.

There is a small but dedicated following in the Non-PL DDT, and we were hoping that something of a re-brand may boost participation and help to build the excellent sub-community there.

We want to keep the focus to Non-PL teams, to prevent it being drowned out by Big 6 fans - but we will soften this slightly, in that comments of PL-supporting fans are valid, providing they were “at the match” that weekend.

It may not work, but worth giving a go, eh…

Rules:

  1. Discussion must be of your local team - whether they were you local growing up, or are your local now
  2. Discussion of PL teams is allowed only if you are attending the match that weekend - and hence focused on the match day experience
  3. Keep a high bar. This is not the DDT. If you want to troll, bait, or shit-talk like it’s Football Twitter, use the DDT. Or even better - Twitter.
  • listello@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    This thread comes with a perfect timing, today we (Mantova) are playing as leaders of a professional league for the first time since 2006!

    On Tuesday we took the leadership after beating third-placed Pro Vercelli. We were starting with 7 reserves and despite that it was probably our best match I have ever attended. I had already seen something very good in the previous games, but this one was really impressive for a third division side.Our coach is a former assistant of De Zerbi, so the style of play is more or less that one, but I wasn’t expecting it to work so well in Serie C: instead, we always manage to dominate possession and we actually play beautifully at times (compared to the average quality of Serie C, of course).

    We might even lose the lead today (we play the new third-placed team away) but I don’t care, five months ago I witnessed us getting relegated to Serie D after a truly atrocious performance. Then we have been readmitted, ownership changed (we were previously “multi-owned” by Verona’s owner) and there is finally a long-term project (clearly aimed at promotion in 3-4 years) with a serious owner. For this year that’s already enough.

    We are definitely not favourites for promotion, so I’m just enjoying the moment while it lasts, while keeping an eye on the advantage over the relegation play-outs (which is currently 13 points) and counting the points we still need to be reasonably sure to be safe: last year 46 points were needed to avoid the play-outs, we’re already at 23 so we need 23 more. Personally I postpone any other consideration to when we’ll reach 46 points.