Bristol Rovers

If you are coming along to The Memorial Stadium for our game against Portsmouth on Saturday, we hope you will purchase a copy of our matchday programme, The Pirate.

Having undergone a major revamp in the summer, our matchday magazine for the game will consist of 72 pages and will cost you just £3. For those of you who don’t always buy a programme because you think that you have seen all of the articles and features on our website, you might be pleasantly surprised. Much of the content is unique and exclusive to the programme and won’t have been published elsewhere.

In this issue manager Darrell Clarke and Chairman Nick Higgs both pen their own columns and we carry interviews with Ellis Harrison and Billy Bodin, while we test you to see if you remember all the players who have worn the number none shirt since the turn of the century. Hands up if you remember Chris Dickson and Paul Heffernan!

Our four page Academy section includes match reports from two U-18 games, a feature on our Academy U-10’s and a profile of first year scholar Tyler Tucker-Dixon.

We’re sure that those of you who have supported the club for a number of years will enjoy our extended history section and in this issue we bring you the third in a series of articles by David Woods on the history of Bristol newspapers. Our feature titled the Great and the Good, about players who have turned out for the club over the years features Vitalijs Astafjevs as the ‘Great’ and three good players you might not remember at all!

Alongside all of the official club news, we also bring you an eclectic mix of articles from a number of contributors, all of whom have one thing in common; they are all Gasheads!

The latest commercial news and thoughts from the Supporters Club and Young Pirates are also included and we hope that if you haven’t previously purchased a copy of our programme you will make a point of buying one on Saturday.

A number of supporters have asked about the possibility of receiving a digital copy of the programme and we are currently exploring the possibility of making this happen.

However we would like to know how many supporters would be interested in subscribing, on an annual basis, to a digital copy. There are cost implications involved in producing a digital issue, in spite of some supporters believing that there are no costs involved.

It could be as much as £99 per month, which means we would be looking for quite a large number of subscribers.

We would be interested to know how many supporters are interested in digital issues, so please contact our Programme Editor Keith Brookman on keithbrookman@bristolrovers.co.uk and let him know your thoughts!