The seats are the folding kind and every one has a sensor that reads down or up, because the attendance is the safety number. Every night at a quarter to eight the seats in the north stand go down. Not all at once. A wave, from the front row backward, the way a crowd sits when it has been standing for a goal, and the sensors count the seats down, and the number is the record attendance, which was set before the stand had seats.
I am the control room supervisor at a football club and the seat count is the number on my wall.
The seats.
Every seat in the ground is a folding seat with a sensor, down or up, feeding a count to my screen, because on a match day the count is the attendance and the attendance is what the safety certificate is about. On a night with no match every seat is up and the count is zero.
At a quarter to eight the north stand goes down.
The wave.
Front row first. Left to right, in about two seconds, the seats going down with the clatter they make, and then the second row, and the third, and up the stand, row by row, a wave, the way a stand sits after a goal when the whole thing has been on its feet, and it takes about a minute to reach the back, and the count on my screen goes up as it goes, and at the back row it stops.
Forty seven thousand three hundred and twelve.
That is not the north stand's capacity. The north stand holds eleven thousand. The count says forty seven thousand and some, from eleven thousand seats, and it is the record attendance, which is on a board in the boardroom, and which was set in the fifties, when the north end was a terrace and people stood.
What has been checked.
The sensors, on a sample of a hundred seats, replaced. They go down at a quarter to eight.
The stand, at a quarter to eight, by me, at the front. The wave came up behind me. I turned round and watched eleven thousand seats go down, row by row, on their own, with nobody in them, and the sound of it, and then the other sound, which was under the seats, which was people. The sound of a terrace. Not seats. Standing. The shift and press and murmur of a great many people standing close together on concrete steps, which is a sound that has not been made in this ground for forty years, and I stood at the front of it and it went on up behind me, and I did not turn round again.
The number.
The record was a cup match. The historian has it. The gates were shut with people still outside. The terrace at the north end held, that day, more than it should have, and the club had been lucky, everybody said afterwards, that nothing had happened, and the number was on the board as a matter of pride, and the historian said that the men who had been on that terrace talked about it for the rest of their lives as the best day, packed in, unable to move, and singing.
They are back. All forty seven thousand and some, or the ones who are dead, which is most of them by now, on a terrace that is seats, and the seats go down because that is what a seat does when there is weight on the stand, and the count reads what the terrace held, because the sensors are reading something other than seats.
What is done about it.
The count at a quarter to eight is on the log every night and the safety officer has seen it and has asked me whether we have forty seven thousand people in the north stand at a quarter to eight, and I have said the sensors say so, and he has said, and do we, and I have said, go and look, and he has not.
What I do.
I run the control room.
The record is a number on a board in a boardroom. It should be more than that. A ground that had its best day sixty years ago and has never told the people who made it has been letting them come back every night to a stand of seats to be counted, and the count goes on my screen and I write it in the log and nobody says it.
So I say it. The PA is on my desk. At a quarter to eight, when the wave reaches the back row and the count settles, I switch on the north stand speakers, and I say the thing the announcer says at the end of a match, which is the attendance. I say, today's attendance, and I say the number, and I say, thank you for your support, and I switch off.
The seats stay down for a while, after that. They used to go up as soon as the count settled. Now they stay, for a minute or so, and under them the terrace sound goes on, and then there is a thing that a crowd does when the attendance is read out and it is a record, which is cheer itself, and the north stand does that, eleven thousand empty seats and forty seven thousand people, and then the seats go up, row by row, from the back this time, the way a stand empties, and the count goes to zero, and I write it in the log, and I have started writing under it, in the comments, record attendance, and nobody has queried it.