The date for the Sportsmans Dinner is Friday 21st September back at the Club. The guest speaker will be Barry Fry, a well known footballing man indeed and the comedian will be Jimmy Carol.
Tickets will be priced at £30 each, please do your best to support the event, its back at the Club so bar revenue will be the Club’s. Please try and sell tables let me know or Mark Bailey or any of the Director’s. Lets get the season off with a full house.
Good choice .
Seems support for this money raising event is not good - in danger of being cancelled - come on get your yourself booked in - it will be a good night . Barry Fry is brilliant i am informed. Perhaps young Chad could give it a plug on Cheshire FM tonight ? Are we becoming too complacent now the team is playing well .
Does the bar take now go to the Club, or is the bar ‘leased’ out to a 3rd party as i understood it to be last year?
I think the general apathy is more to do with the fact that the last 2 dinners were Ricky Hatton and Frank Bruno. No offense to Bazza, but he’s not quite in the same league!! Although i’m informed he does pack a decent punch…!!
Not sure about the politics of the event but if it brings money in for Witton surely it is worthwhile supporting. Perhaps Greenie could sit on the top table and give us some rants.
You are quite the event is in danger of being cancelled, at the last count only seven tables had confirmed which is not sufficient. Mark Bailey is ringing around people and trying to get some more tables, but if we have not achieved at least 12 - 14 tables by Monday morning the event will be cancelled to avoid the club paying out cancellation fees.
This clearly makes a dent in the club’s income for the year as the Finance Director has I am sure included the potential profit from two events this season into the equation.
This is not good news to say the least.
Come on then chaps get your name down pronto.
drinks on you?
Yes
DINNER CANCELLED
These events are primarily aimed at the business people of the town. The cancellation is not down to Fans supporting the event, but more down to an inability to sell tickets.
Bad news that the Sportsmans Dinner as been cancelled >:( I had table booked with Pick.
Just goes to show what a great Job GE did.
Spot on.
Just an idea here for future sportsmans dinners if we our tailoring these events to businesses then why not have a cheaper version for the fans maybe along the lines of an Albion legends night with a question and answer session with some of the greats from Witton’s past like Karl Thomas, Colin Rose, Keith Higgins, And Grimshaw, Stuart Anderson, Brian Griffin etc I think they all live quite close and would be a good way to rekindle some old memorys and maybe price it at £15 so every one can afford to come.
Just a thought!
Good idea, and GE did a great job, sadly the club at the moment doesn’t appear to have anyone who can get round the business people and sell sponsorship, boards never mind tickets for a dinner.
Yeah it’s a shame that someone who’s retired/semi-retired couldn’t step in and help GE’s and everyone else’s hard work.
Maybe it could be an idea to pay someone as a full time job to do this. I know alot of non-league clubs are now doing this as paying someone 15k a year in return for recieving 30k plus of sponsorship is well worth it.
I think the local business community would be receptive of getting involved in a local sports clubs as its good PR also I think alot of the local business men who have sponsored a club not to far away from ours are now reluctant to do so while their current regime is in place, therefore this would a great opportunity to grab these people and get them involved with Witton.
Just another thought!!!
Just a thought, but who organised this particular event? Should it not be their responsibility to push this? Or at least to ensure there is no danger of it being so poorly attended that it ends up being cancelled?
You can’t just book an event and then cross your fingers that people are going to attend. At £30 a ticket, and then whatever you spend on the night going on top of that, then you are only going to attend if it is something that interests you. And as i have said earlier, on the back of previous evenings with Ricky Hatton and Frank Bruno, then - in all due respect - an evening with Barry Fry isn’t going to get the same interest.
It’s a real shame it has been cancelled, but the only real effort at pushing it that i have witnessed is from posts on here saying we have not shifted enough tables. Was enough effort made to sell tickets? When did Mark Bailey begin ringing around? Thursday last week? Earlier?
If you organise an event then you need to make sure the interest is there at the earliest possible opportunity, rather than leaving it so late. Hopefully a lesson can be learnt for future events.
Unfortunately even at Witton, when you organise an event you have to put the leg work in, sometimes to the extent of putting tickets in peoples hands, whilst extracting the money from their pockets.
GE and Lenny are masters at this, because they make it beyond the stand wall and onto the terraces.
At every home game we have a captive, receptive audience who can’t be expected to make contact with individuals they don’t know.
As per previous posting, this particular event is aimed more towards people who wouldn’t normally come to the club.
I agree when you say you are going to organise an event you then take on responsibilty, if you can’t do it then don’t start, after the last one was cancelled (john conteh) Mike and I were asked to run the next one, we got Norman Whiteside and the dinner was a sell out, with help from GE we rang around everyone we could think of. Then GE managed to get Ricky Hatton and Frank Bruno both fantastic successes but the hard work was too much for Graham on his own so he passed the batton back and low and behold we now have another cancelled event. On the comment about not having anyone to sell sponsorships etc never mind tickets what are all the people that are in the office doing? when I went down to book my table last week you couldn’t get in there for people, one on the computer two stood talking and good old Cyril (who didn’t know who I needed to talk to about booking a table!)
In fairness to Barry Fry - I’ve been to several well attended sporting dinners when the names weren’t as big as Ricky Hatton etc. If the effort is put in selling tickets it shouldn’t be so bad - it doesn’thave to be a massive sell out at the civic hall to be a success and earn the club money.
As for a £15k commercial manager the club has been there and tried it, extra revenue I’d expect would be minimal as the majority of sponsorship comes from fans or thir companies. Jack richards, supporters team , my firm this Saturday etc.