Dear Wanderers fans,
The final whistle on Saturday will mark the end of our league campaign, not the end of the journey. Luton Town at Toughsheet, with the play-offs to follow.
I am writing to you directly because what happens at the conclusion of this match matters and I want you to hear it from me.
After the game, our players and their families will walk the pitch to thank you for the backing you have given them across this campaign. Home and away, midweek in the rain, Saturday afternoons under floodlights, you have shown up. Steven Schumacher’s squad knows it. Michael, Nick and I know it. That lap is theirs to give and yours to receive. It has been earned by a season of football this town can be proud of.
It can only happen if the pitch remains clear.
I have been at this football club for almost seven years and I know what it is to want to share that emotion up close with the players. A pitch invasion, however well-intentioned, is a criminal offence.
Supporters who enter the field of play face arrest, court summons and football banning orders that strip them of the right to attend matches for years. That is a price I do not want a single Wanderer to pay.
There is a wider cost too. The FA imposes substantial financial penalties on clubs whose fans enter the field, throw objects or light pyrotechnics inside the ground.
Recent sanctions handed down to other clubs in English football have run into hundreds of thousands of pounds. That is money this football club does not give up lightly. It is money that should go into Steven’s playing budget and into the facilities that make Bolton Wanderers what we are building it to be. Not into a regulatory penalty because a small number of people could not stay in their seats for ten minutes after a final whistle.
So here is the ask. Please stay in the stands and keep the pyros at home. Sing yourselves hoarse and lift the roof off Toughsheet.
Please let the players and their families come to you. Let the children of this squad have their moment on the pitch with their parents.
After the lap is done properly, we go into the play-offs together.
The atmosphere you have created at the Toughsheet this season has been a real factor in results. Opposition managers have remarked on it. Our players speak about it openly. We will need that, and more, in the matches that follow Luton. Your voice is the one thing our opponents cannot prepare for.
I will be at Toughsheet on Saturday.
Lift the place and roar these players on.
Stay in the stands please so the lap of honour belongs to all of us.
One Club. One Community. One Town.
Sharon