Wednesday night at 6pm on Salford City Radio our guests will be from the University of Salford talking ahead of Friday’s big partnership announcement, world record attempt and generally rugby league in the city.

We’ll also be disecting last Friday’s defeat at Oldham and having a look at this week’s deby against Swinton. All that plus tunes from the Stones, Ian Brown, The Verve, James, plus much more….

94.4FM or listen online at www.salfordcityradio.org….

And don;t forget we are repeated on Friday 6-7PM if you miss any of it..

Email me on paul.mcnally@reds.co.uk up until about 4.30pm or on studio@salfordcityradio.org for shouts and requests….

See you there..

Paul

Pauls opening dinner will take place on Thursday 6 March 2008,

Tickets are now available from the club shop priced at £35 for dining and £10 for non - dining.

To reserve tickets please email Paul directly on paulhightontestimonial@hotmail.co.uk or phone the club shop on 0161 736 6564.

Tickets will also be available from Shorley Bradshaw before and after the game in the Willows on Friday night

Aloha good people,

On tonight’s (Weds) Rugby Roundup on 94.4FM / www.salfordcityradio.org you can expect a little cross-city banter as my studio guest is John Thomason from the Swinton Lions who will be behind the mic with myself and Paul Parkin to have a natter about thing rugby related in the city. 6PM is the time to set on your alarm.

We’ll be talking about last weekend’s big derby, having a chat about what Swinton are trying to do to get a second strong team back in the city and also we’ll be looking forward to this weekend’s games.

I’ve also got tickets to win for next week’s return derby at The Willows so make sure you listen in for all that, a good laugh and some cracking music along the way

If you have any questions you’d like to ask, requests, shouts or whatever you can email me here at paul.mcnally@reds.co.uk or just leave a comment, or after about five you can email us direct in the studio by whizzing your imaginative prose to studio@salfordcityradio.org.

Last week we had one from a cat so please don’t be afraid, it can’t get any weirder.

Don’t forget if you can’t tune in on Weds the show is now repeated 6-7PM on Friday’s too so if you’re looking for some listening while you’re trying to get over to Oldham….

Don’t say I never tell you anything..

Now available from the Club Shop, priced 1.50.

The ones available now are the ’strip’ kind, with larger A5 sized stickers to follow very soon indeed.

Well, tonight (Wednesday) sees the third broadcast of our new radio show on Salford City Radio 94.4 FM (or the net at www.salfordcityradio.org).

So far I think it’s going alright. The second show was a gazillion times better than the first but due to a problem with net streaming for the station I think fewer people probably heard it than they should.

We’ve moved to rectify this kind of thing and negotiated with the guys at the station that the show will be replayed on a Friday between 6-7pm, which is a good time for us because it’s either when we are not playing, or at a time when you are probably getting ready to go to the match if we’re at home.

We’ve recruited Mr Parkin to be on every week for his punditry from a fans perspective and I’m very, very pleased about that.

Please do get involved though, email in during the week to me at paul.mcnally@reds.co.uk or when we are on air to studio@salfordcityreds.org

You can also text in, just listen to the show for details of the number etc.

Wednesday’s special guest should be testimonial boy Paul Highton so it should be worth a listen.

Tune in and let us know what you think.

It seems like a good time to talk about this, having seen some impressive examples of it of late, perhaps none more so than the turnout at Rochdale on a bitterly cold day - a following that certainly bodes well for our average attendances, so vital in this year of SuperLeague license applications.

Better still is the fact that our Season Ticket base hasn’t just held up despite relegation, it has actually increased, and with another big week of sales still to come before the first home game it should grow even more. Even the most optimistic Reds worker would be lying if they tried to say that they truly expected that when Season Tickets went on sale last year. Hoped? Yes. Expected? Nope.

A big well done to everyone who has put their money where their mouth is in support of the club.

The Captain’s club has been a great success, with just shy of 100 members in the first year! In case you don’t know what The Captain’s club is, its members exclusively number those Reds Season Ticket Holders who have persuaded a friend, relative or acquaintance to buy a Season Ticket of their own - something we realise was more difficult than normal given the disappointments of last season. With some people introducing more than one new Season Ticket holder this means that we actually have over 100 new Season Ticket holders who were introduced by current members for 2008 - a fantastic effort by the Reds faithful*.

You may remember that we launched the Loyalty Scheme for Barton last year - any 2008 Season Ticket Holders should rest assured that they are guaranteed first pick of places when the doors open at the new stadium in early 2010. All being well, we will soon be announcing an extension of the scheme to assist those who cannot take up a Season Ticket for whatever reason. The final details are still being worked out, but I can tell you that a Loyalty Points scheme will be introduced that will be open to all fans who attend the final games at The Willows over the next two years, and that once Season Ticket holders have all been satisfactorily placed within the new stadium, we will offer the choice next to supporters in strict order of how many loyalty points they have racked up in 2008 and 2009.

To qualify for points all you will have to do is purchase your ticket any time before game day. We believe this will be the fairest way to reward our current fans and make sure they do not get usurped by any of the many new supporters we expect to be attracted to the shininess of the new stadium. Like I said, the finer points are still being worked on, so what I have just said is subject to change - we’ll let you know as and when we’re ready to launch the scheme officially (which will hopefully be before the first league game).

Why not make use of the comments facility to let us know your thoughts and suggestions on that?

*Despite what Trish may have said at the first Meet the Players evening, we realise there are equally loyal Reds fans who aren’t members of the 2008 Captain’s Club, and that not all fans were in a position to introduce a new Season Ticket holder this year, having exhausted their supply of eligible friends and family over many years of unflinchingly loyal support!

(Hopefully that smoothes that one over )

Hang on. What’s all this? Well ‘Blogging’ is finally about to arrive at Salford’s famous old rugby club.

Now you are possibly of the camp that know and embrace the theory of everybody has an opinion and a right to state that opinion no matter how offensive it may be. Now as marvelous an ideal that may be, it really isn’t practical for a professional sports club where emotions sometimes run high.

We were one of the last remaining sports clubs in the UK with a message forum and to be honest, other clubs thought we were a smidgen mad. “It’s a lawsuit” waiting to happen seemed to be the cry and eventually we had to agree. The net has matured and no longer are clubs in a position to allow potential libellous comments pass them by in this age of litigation. So at the end of last season after three very successful years, we pulled the shutters down on EVE, our message forum, and personally I breathed a sigh of mini-relief in a way.

Being at the mercy of any potential keyboard warrior from any club, especially with the season we were having, meant extra vigilance, especially on a match night to make sure no errant posts snuck through in the early post pub/club hours.

That left us with a dilemma and one that I believe this new section will go some way to resolving. We’re a family club - a close-knit bunch and the last thing we want with the move on the horizon is to lose touch with the people who have stuck by us through thin and thin. So here come the blogs - somewhere a little less formal to hang out and read opinion and also get a little more familiar with the people who work here.

To host them we have registered a new domain as the more beady-eyed may already have noticed, and this is something we hope to grow as sime marches by. Over the next few weeks more staff will join in as well as celebrity faces, some more unexpected than others. Most importantly perhaps we have given voice over to the fans. For starters a couple of key faces from Forever Reds have been approached and you can already read King of the Shed’s first musing but we are by no means against taking more views on board. All we ask is that they are considered, thoughtful viewpoints, spoken from the heart, but remembering what may be a throwaway statement to you could damge the club in a big way.

We are tweaking the look and technology behind the current www.reds.co.uk site as well and pretty soon posts from these blogs will appear in truncated form on there, to make it easier to spot when something new is worth reading. It would have been nice to get all this in place for one mega launch but as ever the clockhas caught me up and it’s kick off time, so watch this space.

Along the sides we have gathered local RSS feeds into the one page, I believe making this page the essential spot on the internet to find out what the press are saying about us. It will also be a place where you can find out any little useful bits of information that our various departments are up to. We’ll also be uploading all our images week in week out to our new Flickr resource and you’ll see them appear here. You can even post the articles on here to your Facebook acocunt or take part in regular polls. Personally i think it will be ace

If only blogs were the only thing I had to talk about it may not be so bad, but it’s half past midnight and time for my beauty sleep now so next time I’ll fill you in on my new radio show on Salford City Radio (Weds 6-7 94.4FM time fans!) and what you can expact from that.

I hope you enjoy what we are about to try here. As ever, we like to think we are up there at the forefront of net technolgy when it comes to sports clubs online.

Thanks for listening to the ramble.

Paul