A fevnut special: Summer Bash Attendance

   

 

Summer Bash

 

Last week, in our ‘musings’ column we wrote about the corruption of a straightforward and fair fixture list for the league season.

In order to have a fair league table, each team should play the other teams in the league twice, once at home and the other away. This fairness is distorted by Summer Bash being a part of the league season.

Yes, it is good to have an opportunity for all the teams and supporters to come together, but that really shouldn’t be for matches which count in the league table.

Now it has become clear that Summer Bash is failing with attendances dropping quite drastically over the last two years. It was introduced in 2015 and has been played each year since except in 2020 and 2021 when it was not held because of the Covid Pandemic.

Here are the attendances for each year:

 

We decided to compare this year’s attendance to a ‘normal’ round. That sounds a simple thing to do but is complicated by the fact that, this year, the clubs in all divisions have been very lax in publishing attendance figures. The last round for which we have the complete set of attendances is round 8 which is the round played over the Easter weekend.

At first glance that is problematical because it is a bank holiday weekend, but having thought about it we realised that is actually quite appropriate as the Bash was also played on a Bank Holiday weekend.

 

So, this reveals that the total attendance for Summer Bash was less than 42% of the total attendance for Round 8!

Surely it is time that Summer Bash, as part of the League Season, was consigned to the dustbin and we returned to a league table that doesn’t get potentially distorted by the luck of the draw at Bash.