Pre-season friendly, South Melbourne 7 Dandenong City 1 + Facts? Sure, why not!

I ventured out to Lakeside this morning for a sparring session between South and Dandenong City. It started a bit later than apparently scheduled, and I was busy responding to a tweet directed to me so I missed the first goal.

Luckily there were several more goals were that came from, to the point where I lost count - I didn't even realise that Dandy City had scored. They didn't really threaten too often, while we looked fairly sharp, or at least Stefan Zinni who is hoping to impress I guess, did, because most of the good stuff was coming from his side on the right.

Shouty Mike wasn't in attendance, but if you went by his Twitter account he still probably got a better handle on the game than probably most people there, who were having a good old fashioned chin wag.

Across the three 30 minute periods we seemed to field fairly strong lineups, as opposed to trawling through an endless amount of triallists as can be the case this early on during the pre-season.

You build 'em, I'll count 'em department
Last year as part of the pointlessly elongated task of establishing exactly how much seating capacity Lakeside Stadium currently has, the "new stand's" approximate seating capacity was established as being about 2420,

• 10 bays of 14 rows with 14 seats each (1960)
• 2 bays at the ends with 14 rows with 7 seats each (196)
• 2 truncated bays with 6 full rows of 14 seats (168) and 8 rows of 6 seats (96), for a total of 264. 

But of course that was the least controversial aspect of all this. The long running mystery and/or matter of contention has always been on "our" stand. I've long believed that the seating capacity has been around 2,900, while others have been of the belief that it gets close to as much as 4,000. Anyway, here is the breakdown.

• 2 end bays of 17 rows with 12 seats each, for a total of 408
• 1 bay affected by the players race, which has 12 full rows of 19 seats (228), and 5 rows of 10 seats (50), for a total of 278
• 1 bay which has 14 rows of 19 (266), and three rows currently partly occupied by a gantry in place of some seats (seat total of those rows is 28; the number of seats 'missing' is 29) for a total of 294
• 6 complete/full bays of 17 rows each with 19 seats, adding up to 1938

All of which of adds up to a total of 2918 actual seats in "our" grandstand. I'm not counting the capacity of the corporate boxes, or taking into consideration of the potential for seating or sponsor boxes to be placed along the balcony, just the actual seats that are actually in the grandstand.

Those 2918 seats along with the 2420 seats in the newer stand = 5338.

I hope that puts paid to any more wildly errant speculation on this matter. While no doubt people will use this info for discussing the merits or otherwise of Lakeside as an A-League venue, this count was not motivated by discussions around that; mostly it was conducted out of frustration at the uninformed arguments being made about what Lakeside's seating capacity is, and by extension what our better crowds are.