Best of all though was the cafe in the parkland outside front of stadium. Looks like old cricket pavilion but awesome. Sky sports on and the all day brekkie £3.90 was enormous. Mixture of home and away fans it was busy but not packed and food came with 5 mins of ordering.

Stadium facilities were poor to my mind. No burger van or outside caterer although there was a club run bar. Ground is small due to no stand on 1 side so made a nice change to sit side on. Atmosphere was good and home fans support was good, as was our away (593 alleged but seemed like twice that)

Overall nice day, even better that we won.

We arrived a good 3 hours before kickoff, so decided to park up in the car park next to the ground (BIG mistake.. more on that later) and head out to get some food and a few pints inside us. A friendly steward directed us to The Dolphin pub on the main road about a 10 minute walk from the ground (we walked past the Queens Park pub, and can confirm that it is indeed sadly now “Home fans only”)

The Dolphin wasn’t a bad pub – They had decent food and the drink wasn’t that badly priced. Home and away fans were able to mix (there was even a Brighton fan who’d stopped off on his way to a BHA home game) without any hint of trouble. They were showing the lunchtime kickoff game on the big screen too, so if you’re a Plastic Premiership fan, you can still get your fix before watching a real football match.

We took our seats in the stadium with about 10 minutes to go – view of play was excellent (away fans are situated along one side of the pitch.. we were in line with the edge of the penalty area), and there’s a scoreboard for those of you who can’t count (it might have been needed for our game though.. we lost 3-0, and our keeper got man of the match.. it honestly could have been 7 or 8).

So having been well and truly hammered, we return to our car in the car park to find we’ve been given a parking ticket. Turns out that the wasteground car park is actually a pay and display car park – Quite where they’d hidden the pay machines or signs warning you it was a P&D carpark I’m not sure, as the carpark was pretty empty when we arrived, and we couldn’t see any – We weren’t the only ones to have been caught out either.. I spoke to at least 10 other drivers who got stung too.

Of course, you then need to get out of said car park. Which is achieved by a process of “free-for-all” driving across the wasteland to the exit that is big enough for one car, which leads onto a one-track road. A road that has traffic lights at the end of it that let two cars through every minute. End result – we finally got out of the car park nearly TWO HOURS after the final whistle. It took us less time to drive all the way home!

Not a bad away day – the Bournemouth fans are a good crowd and the stadium itself is ok. But whatever you do – DON’T park in the car park next to the ground.