Oxford United chairman Sumrith 'Tiger' Thanakarnjanasuth wrote the following notes for today's match programme against Charlton Athletic:
Welcome back for our penultimate home game of the season, against a very good Charlton side who have hit form at just the right time. What a game we should have today with both sides committed to attack and looking to give their fans a win.
It is a busy weekend and I hope everybody has a great Easter. In Thailand we have just celebrated our New Year and the Songkhran festival and I really enjoyed watching the video of some of our players visiting the Thaikhun restaurant in central Oxford to cook some Thai dishes last week as we joined the celebrations. They did a good job and I want to thank Thaikhun and Singha for helping us celebrate new year in this way.
More importantly, we continue to be in good form and a draw against Wimbledon last week made it 13 points from a maximum of 15. Some of the football was a joy to watch; our ball retention is very good and we should definitely have won the game. Their goalkeeper made three fantastic saves and kept them in the game, but I still thought we looked very impressive and can take a lot of positives from the game.
Talking of positives, I was really pleased with the reaction when we put season tickets on sale this week. Plenty of you snapped them up straight away and I thank you for that. We wanted to freeze prices as much as we could. That is not an easy decision for any club because season tickets are one of the most important revenue streams for clubs at this level. But we also want to create noise and atmosphere and so we want to offer good entertaining football at affordable prices.
That is why we have cut prices in the East Stand: a season ticket is just over £30 cheaper for next season and now under £300 for 23 games. Look at most games and the heart of the singing is behind the goal. By cutting match prices in that stand to £20 we want to try and make it full as often as we can next year and bring colour and passion to that area each week.
Clearly, that stand will be a lot busier if we build a winning side and we have had very constructive talks over the last few weeks, months even, where we have identified a number of players to strengthen us and add to what I think we have shown since January is a very strong and very talented squad. Get behind those players today; a sold-out away end is only going to help with atmosphere but we know the Oxford fans will be even louder and ready to play a big part in helping us get three more points.
You can read the full programme online at www.matchdayfix.com/oufc