So it's over. After all the hype and anticipation the match is done.
I think we ran a good operation and with the club we were able to make sure that some of the risks people were predicting never happened.
There were some incidents of course, 11 people arrested so far and some people injured but, as far as I am aware as I type this, no one seriously hurt.
However, life in the City on a Saturday lunch time went ahead pretty much as normal and by far the majority of fans were well behaved.
There were some ugly scenes in Britannia Rd after the game which we were able to deal with without it getting very serious. I know some of the images of that look nasty and it was an unpleasant event but it was the kind of thing we had planned for.
It's just a pity that some fans chose to act the way they did at the end. We will be following up with an investigation to see if more people should be arrested and perhaps charged or put forward for banning orders.
There's been some criticism that we should have kept the Pompey fans in the stadium at the end for longer.
Actually many of them stayed inside through their own choice and we had a clear area outside for them to move into so there was no need to keep them in.
Even if we had I think it was apparent that a number of Saints fans were intent on waiting for them outside to find them somewhere.
It's very hard to completely segregate home and away fans when there is such a large area to cover as we move fans from the stadium to the station.
Everyone has a view about the best way to manage these issues and we always learn from experience but you can't always predict how crowds are going to behave except to say that, as always, by far the majority of fans behaved well.
Now its back to the more routine matches, maybe until a season not too far away when these derby games could be more frequent.
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