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.

Photo: Action Images

Whatsforpud added 11:37 - Nov 9 I read a while ago that the Championship is the best supported second league in the world, which is a credit to English football generally. It would be interesting to see the figures from the major footballing countries. There was a time when people were advocating St Mary's being extended. But I think it is about right for us. We would have had a 25k stadium at Stoneham.

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Bowlercow added 12:01 - Nov 9 W/for/p If we extended to say 40k with an upper tier it would be somewhere for the away fans Had we built at Stoneham with all the road rail and air links I honestly believe we could have had a virtually full stadium of 40 thousand Many are put off at SMS because of the parking and getting away at the end
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Whatsforpud added 12:19 - Nov 9 Bowlercow, I thought that the approval of the Stoneham site was for a max of 25k. Re St Mary's, there is a greater walk-up from where people live, than on the edge of the city. Re rail links, we have a line right next to the stadium - probably nearer than at any other ground. Why hasn't this been used?
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SaintNick added 13:15 - Nov 9 To answer a few questions posed on hear. Stoneham was for 25k max even that figure could not be go past the council, it terms of rail links it would be about a mile from Southampton Parkway, roughly the same distance that St Mary's is from Central station. The road links at Stoneham were not great, car parking would have been a nightmare getting out because it would all be forced on to the same motorway junction and people would park in residential areas

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SaintPaulVW added 14:05 - Nov 9 You would hope that a game between two high flying sides, both with decent levels of support on a Saturday at 3pm would be a sell out.
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