After about 90 minutes of queuing I finally got into the store and was pretty impressed with what I saw. After being welcomed by a TV monitor showing Pompey TV highlights I had a gander round the various sections of the store and my first thoughts were that this store has a ton of content and it's light years ahead of the old Fratton Park shops. They even have separate sections for menswear, Canterbury branded stuff and a whole corner showing off replica kit, training shirts and other matchday wear.
The trio of Sylvain Distin, David Nugent and Hermann Hriedarsson were present to sign autographs and if you weren't queuing for their signature, you were enduring a long wait to get to the tills to pay for whatever you picked up.
As for the service, it still needs improving considering nobody seemed to know the prices of the pictures of past Pompey players and of Fratton Park (they weren't labelled with a price, and the same could be said for many of the products).
It looks like new staff have been hired and it's going to take them time to get used to the tills as the look on my mate's face when he thought he was being charged £319 for the new shirt with "NUGET 10" on the back was priceless. One of the staff doing the shirt printing also almost printed "UTAKA 15" on the back of one customer's shirt until they corrected them by saying that he is actually number 17.
Maybe I'm being a tad harsh as after all, it was a long day on a big occasion and being honest, if people criticized me for every typo and grammatical error I've made when writing for Fratton Faithful I would have been fed to the slaughterhouse by now!
After what seemed like forever queuing up, I left the new store with my new Pompey shirt with "MUNTARI 11" printed on the back and £52 down. The shirt feels quite nice and I prefer the new Premier League font to the old one but I warn anyone who hasn't bought or ordered their shirt yet to try before you buy as the shirts seem more skintight than kits of previous years.
Overall, the new store made a good impression on me and many other Pompey fans who attended the grand opening, proving that this is indeed another step in putting the club on the global map.