Having successfully sold tickets for the sell out games against AFC Wimbledon and Leeds United we are bitterly disappointed that some of our loyal and fantastic supporters have been left without a ticket for the Arsenal game.

We would like to thank everyone who helped the club yesterday, and to the many supporters who showed great patience and understanding in what became a difficult situation which led to us having to restrict the sales of tickets to one per person. We will clearly look at what we could have done better, and will review our ticketing policy for future games. We are a traditional non-league club who pride ourselves on being a volunteer run Community Club, and are learning every day.

We are very  proud of how the Club has been able to reach out to the whole community by installing our new third generation pitch, which included bringing 30 junior teams, and our Community teams led by Steve King, back to the stadium.  A feature of this is all players receive one child and adult season ticket, to make them feel a special bond with the first team club.

We also wanted as many people in the Borough to be able to afford to watch their local team, and again we are very proud to have nearly 1,500 season ticket holders on the back of this initiative.

We, as a club, have never experienced such a huge demand for tickets. We followed the same protocol for the Wimbledon and Leeds games in relation to the selling of the tickets, as this had worked extremely well. Around 400 tickets for those games were left after the first day of going on sale enabling season ticket holders to buy additional tickets for both games.  Clearly the demand for this game was unprecedented in all categories.

Can every full season ticket holder and shareholder who missed out on securing a ticket yesterday please contact the Club (davef@suttonunited.net) as soon as possible. In the previous rounds we have had a number of tickets returned to us and expect something similar over the next few days, and we hope to be able to rectify the problems we encountered yesterday.

Once again  we sincerely apologise to those supporters affected either by queuing or telephoning yesterday, a day that saw over 4,000 tickets sold in five hours, and promise we will learn from what happened.

Bruce Elliott, Chairman. (chairman@suttonunited.net)