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Only a Thousand Tickets Left For 4th V 5th Place Saints V West Brom Clash

With two days left before the game against West Bromwich Albion, Southampton are down to the last 1,000 or so tickets for the Championship promotion six pointer against the Baggies.

Another 30,000 crowd is expected at St Mary's on Saturday with the on line ticketing system showing only around a 1,000 tickets left in the general seating areas for a game that sees 4th place Saints take on 5th place West Brom.

Once again Southampton fans are turning out in great numbers at home to back their team and this looks set to continue on Saturday with another near capacity attendance.

If usual selling trends continue before Saturday's 3pm kick off then these 1,000 ticket may well be snapped up before lunchtime on the day of the game, although it should be noted but not relied upon, that Saints ticket system has a tendency to suddenly add extra seats previously showing as unavailable to the system.

The big question though will be whether West Brom will have sold out their near 3,000 allocation, they have in general travelled in good numbers this season, although being in the centre of the country and with nearby Birmingham being a central transport hub for both the train and motorway networks, it does make it easy for them to get to away games.

Of their 8 games played on the road so far, 3 of them have been under 40 miles, with the lowest being 5 miles to Birmingham City 20 miles to Coventry and 38 to Stoke.

Add to that Bristol City, Blackburn, Preston & Watford all around the 90-95 mile mark and the only trip longer than that is Leeds United at 105 miles.

So the trip to Southampton at 127 miles is the 6th longest of the season after Plymouth, Sunderland, Middlesbrough, Ipswich & Norwich .

Any way I digress, despite playing fairly close games away from home so far , they have travelled in reasonable numbers, but not great ones, at Coventry, only 20 miles away, they could had 3,000 tickets but sold barely half of them, yes it was a Friday night game on TV, but contrast that with the numbers that we took for TV games midweek to Stoke & Preston as well as Sheffield Wednesday on a Friday night and their away support hasn't been that good given the closeness of the games played so far and their League position.

A look at the West Brom web site reveals that they have been given 2, 825 tickets and that these haven't sold out and are now on general sale, so there is potential for either a swathe of unsold tickets in the away section, or a proportion of those being put on sale to Saints supporters.

Either way the likelihood is that this fixture could have more watching it than the last time the two sides met in front of a crowd at St Mary's, that was back in October 2017 when a Sofiane Boufal goal in the last minute won the game 1-0 for Saints in front of 29,947.

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