It's full steam ahead for AFCB, but are you coming too?

We now know the full line up for the 2014/15 Championship. Well done to Rotherham. Whatever their targets for next season I am sure that AFCB's are among the most ambitious. If you hadn't realised it, AFCB is on a course to do everything it can to get to the Premiership. Take a look around you next time you are at Dean Court, it has been changing fast. The people are the same but the vision has altered. I hope the friendliness of the club does not suffer, but there is certainly ambition in peoples' eyes and it is led by the man at the top who we hardly ever see - Maxim Demin. As silent people go he is having a massive impact on what happens next. Sure there are familiar faces around such as Eddie Howe and Jeff Mostyn but many fans may be in less of a rush to get to the Premiership when they look at their increased season ticket prices, it is a different club even from what we knew 12 months ago.

Jeff Mostyn was honest enough to say that the club did not like to see season tickets escalate by so much but I felt that last season was a bit of a tester and that the club perhaps undervalued itself a little and a bit of reality has now set in. This is not a business where it is easy to break even and despite when you have a reasonably successful club. Finances have to be put in place for AFCB to keep its push for the top tier alive and there had to come a time when the club would ask a bit more from its supporters.

How that will all go down is something that we will all see for ourselves come early August when we look around at who is sitting next to us. In some ways it would have been nice if the club had announced a few valuable sweeteners like making some of the pre-season games half price for season ticket holders or discounts on away matches if you have signed up for the new season ticket, such things may yet still happen of course. I also saw a campaign started for raising the Junior Cherry age limit to 18 which would seem sensible to me considering that education continues to the age of 18.

There's a lot happening at the Goldsands stadium these days.

These are all things that we can ponder about and talk to the club about, but the one thing you have to ask yourself is what do you want of your football club. Is it simply good football at the Championship level or the dream of Premiership football? If it is neither, you have long since left the Goldsands stadium and for those that remain the difficult times are coming, because we simply don't have the pool of fans yet that is big enough to keep prices low and sustain the push the club to the heights that it wants to get to. Being an AFCB support is never easy even when the sun is shining.  

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