There were never 9,000 for the visit of Saints to the Ricoh Arena.
Football grounds have always been a passion of mine and after 40 years of ground watching Im usually fairly acurate and predicting just how many are in a sstadium, thats why iwas gobsmacked when the crowd for the Saints V Coventry game was given as 9,000, the first alarm bell was that the attendance was exactly that 9,000 on the nose, when do you ever see that, once in a blue moon is the answer, this seemed to smack of Coventry City trying to give the impression that the much publicised fans boycott was a failure.
The empty stands however told a different story, the visitors section looked the most densly packed area of the stadium and according to the official figures we had 1,734, which i think was about right, to our left the big side had the most home fans probably when all told and being generous probably about 500 more than our section, the far end had a smattering maybe 300 at best and the main stand as such probably had around 800, allowing for a few hundred either way, either way barely 5,000 and certainly no more than 6k.
Thats why I was so shocked at the official attendance, sat watching what for 70 minutes was the most lacklustre competitive game i have ever seen Saints play both on and off the pitch I had plenty of time to contemplate the crowd and to be honest you could have fitted everyone into one end of the ground with ease, given that the record crowd is 31k or so I would say at best each end held 7-8 k so there was no way there were nine thousand present.