Midweek games to stay on Mondays

The U’s switched from their traditional Tuesday slot to Monday as an experiment for the current campaign to avoid frequent clashes with televised coverage of European and international games.

United director Simon Rudkins said: “We’ve not done the number crunching of figures yet, but looking at the attendances I think they are better than some of the midweek ones we had last season.

“To start with we had a few comments from people saying ‘I won’t be coming now’, but now it’s a Monday people just get used to it and we’re carrying on with it next season.”

United have hosted 12 matches on Monday nights in all competitions this term and the 10 league games have produced an average gate of 339.

“I think it’s worked out quite well,” Rudkins continued. “We were always confident it would because before we did it we spoke to other clubs who had done the same thing and they said it worked for them.

“Our main concern was players’ recovery time. We spoke to Terry (White, first team manager) two or three weeks ago and basically said we want to carry on with Monday, and he wasn’t against it.”

The under-21s will continue to play the bulk of their home games on Mondays in 2014/15 and the under-18s’ matches will remain on Thursdays.