Albion have told fans why they did not go for 9,000 tickets at Tottenham.

They will be backed by a sell-out following of 5,700 in their FA Cup fourth round tie on Saturday, February 5.

But the club have been fielding complaints from fans who had not yet booked and believed they had more time.

Albion opted to go for 5,700 after complaints from many supporters over the 8pm kick-off time and likely travel problems on the homeward journey.

Fans are being told: “The ticketing team must make that judgement based on their experience and their analysis of ten years of ticket-buying behaviour from our fans, particularly for cup matches.

“They must consider the opponents, the venue, the kick-off time, day of the week, any transport issues, and time of the year.

“They must balance all of this with not wasting the club’s (Tony Bloom’s) money as Tottenham (like most clubs) require a firm ticket allocation commitment at the outset.

“Based on a Saturday evening in London, a match that is live on terrestrial TV, potential public transport and parking issues, and the time of year (additional match ticket sales are always lower in January and February post Christmas), the team made a judgement.

“They took the second highest allocation Tottenham could offer without us having to commit to 9,000 tickets - and potentially being left with a bill for unsold tickets. Unfortunately, this isn’t an exact science, and it certainly wasn’t clear that we would sell 9,000 tickets.

“In fact, since the ticket sale was announced, we have had only complaints about the difficulty of attending the fixture because of the kick-off time!”

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Fans were warned: “It’s worth noting that we can never guarantee tickets going all the way to a general sale, and we would never advise season ticket holders to wait to purchase outside of their earliest opportunity to do so.

“Neither would we change the ticket sales priority mid-point in the process.”