Our visit to Stoke City is on Boxing Day evening, with kick-off at 8pm, having been put back by our very good friends at Sky Sports.

Stoke moved to the new Stadium now known as the ‘Bet 365’ in 1997, which is next to the A50 on the southern edge of the city, on the site of the former Ham Heath colliery. Like all new stadia it has excellent facilities, but has a rather sterile and soulless feel, with all four side of the stadium looking the same.

As with all other out of town stadia there is a dearth of traditional pubs and takeaways nearby, it's inconvenient for public transport and gets gridlocked with traffic, as a higher proportion of the crowd have to drive. But unlike most out of town stadia the car parking isn't that great at the Britannia. By car you need to leave the M6 at Junction 15 and then go straight across the roundabout onto the A500 towards Stoke.

There are quite a few options for parking, and they are all listed on this handy link. Wherever you park you’ll be likely to be stuck in loads of traffic after the game. And on no account park on wasteland around the stadium, as the traffic wardens are very keen round there and you may end up with a parking ticket.

Stoke railway station is just under three miles from the stadium, so they really ought to have built a new station where the main line to London passes within a few hundred yards of the Bet 365. But they didn’t, not that there’s any chance of getting a train this time anyway.

The best pubs next to the stadium are the Holiday Inn and Harvester Pub, , or the bar at the Power League complex . And on the nearby canal there are two boats, one called the Boatcake, which mostly sells oat cakes and the other called the Bargain Inn Booze which sells beer and lager, which costs £2 a can or bottle.

Our allocation for this game is 3,391, which is an improvement on last season, but not quite back to the days when away supporters used have the whole of the south stand. That was before Stoke got promoted to the Premiership and made more space for their own fans, but now it looks like they are slowly starting to wake up to the fact that these days the locals are staying away in their droves.

This time our tickets cost £30 for adults, with three categories of concessions from £14 to £23. And inevitably our allocation sold out as soon as they went on sale to members. There still seem to be some tickets available for the home stands, but the Stoke City website says “Please note you will need a previous purchase history to buy tickets for this fixture.”.

The views are excellent from every seat as there are no pillars to get in the way, and as the pitch is below outside ground level you walk off the concourse onto the stand about 20 ft above the pitch. They usually sell beer from the bars on the concourse, but it remains to be seen if they will do so on the day of our visit.

There is also a large sign saying that persistent standing will result in ejection from the ground, which could lead to a bit of bother if they’re daft enough to try to enforce it when Leeds are the visitors.

During the Premiership years they increased the capacity by about 2,000 by filling in the gap between the Boothen End and the John Smiths Stand, but no further expansion is planned in these more difficult times.

Some of this stuff came from www.footballgroundguide.com.

Reuters

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