The Irons trip to Spurs has been switched to Thursday 4 January and will be broadcast live on Sky Sports, with a kick-off time of 8pm.
The fixture had been scheduled for Sunday 31 December but the club – in a website announcement – said that despite significant work by all stakeholders, the Safety Advisory Group at Wembley Stadium could only recommend a maximum crowd of 43,000.
As explained in several CandH stories over recent weeks this was due to transport issues, primarily at local tube stations whose resources were being deployed elsewhere on New Year’s Eve.
The statement adds that “a decision has been taken to move the fixture into the New Year so more supporters, home and away, can attend the game.”
The club says ticket and allocation details will be confirmed in due course whilst apologising to fans for the delay in confirming details for this fixture.
This is totally unfair for the ‘ammers as that means they have 3 games in 5 days. WBA on the 2nd January, Spurs on the 4th and then a possible F.A. Cup match on Saturday 6th. Can you see Man U or Chelsea etc agreeing to this. All because of Sky decision to show the Spurs match!
I think if we get an easy draw in the cup it could work in our favour as we have less games around xmas new year week. We won’t know and a lot will be injury dependant as to whether it ends up a plus or minus effect in the long run but it certainly gives us a break between the Newcastle game on 23rd, Bournemouth on 26th now it will be West Brom on 2nd and Tottenham on the 4th where they would have been crammed in on the 31st it’s a 2.5 day rest as opposed to a 3 day rest but in reality with a run of 3 winnable games to get some momentum heading to Spuds which the players should have no problem getting motivated for and we will be fielding a weakened team in the FA cup so I don’t see that as an issue anyway.