The More Things Change.....

New ground, new players, new manager, new fans, new kit, new optimism.

Same old Radio Northampton!

If we thought that by installing ourselves in shiny legoland we'd acquire a one way ticket to being bestest friends with our local BBC radio station, we need to think again!  First away game.  Tuesday evening kick-off.  Likely to be of interest to the majority of Poppies fans.  The opposition were not so long ago in the Championship, so, should have at least rudimentary broadcasting facilities for RN to use?  Did any of this result in online radio coverage by our local, public funded broadcaster?  Did it b*ll*cks!

We're sure that RN will have a good excuse for the lack of coverage again of the Poppies, but will anyone believe them anymore? 



"It always seemed that Radio Northampton
favoured covering the Diamonds
over the Poppies"



At the end of last season PATGOD had a healthy exchange of emails with Geoff Doyle of Radio Northampton on the subject of their coverage of the Poppies and the Scum (RIP).  He tallied up that we were covered, as main commentary, during the 2010-11 season no less than 34 times (5 on the radio, 22 by RN online, and 9 online by another BBC radio station).  This compared to the Scum's 37 appearance (7/22/8).



Now, Geoff seems like a decent sort of bloke, so we have to take his word on this, even though it sounded like an awfully large number of games for us to be on the air.  He suggested that it may have seemed we got less coverage because a lot of the Poppies games they covered were at Rocky Road, and obviously we wouldn't have been tuning as as we were already there.  This could also be true.

But the perception still remains that they would rather broadcast dead air (which happens quite frequently with their infamously outdated equipment) rather than give us any decent coverage.  During our inaugural game at Non Park, as we were running late they could have covered the last, pulsating 15 minutes of our game, but apparently chose not to.  I've heard that they instead either covered badminton, or possibly the Badminton horse trials!  Both, of course ideally suited to radio!