It worked better last week when we played Napoli and against Shakhtar a few weeks back. It's hard work generally when trying to kick things off from the front but it was easier to get it going from the front of the stand in those games compared to last night. Obviously, that was partly due to the fact that there were twice as many away fans last night plus they had the whole of the 3rd tier of the South Stand which for me is the easiest place in the ground to get an atmosphere going. However, I also think that there were less fans in our section who were prepared to sing compared to the Napoli game. Whether the songs start from the front or the back, the middle rows simply don't do enough, or in some cases do absolutely fuck-all. To put it bluntly, some fans in that section are taking the fucking piss - it's a singing section, is advertised as such (even more so now when trying to buy tickets in there online as a message comes up before purchasing that it's a singing section), so why someone would not bother joining in is beyond me. To compound it, we've even had incidents - and I shit you not - where people have been told to stop singing in there, not to mention the **** who threw a bottle of coke at someone last night for daring to wave a flag.
There's definitely an acoustics problem in that area - for example, the low overhang at the back of the stand means songs starting there don't often travel too well plus songs starting at the front often don't get heard at the back so you can have 2 different songs going at once (as happened several times last night), but despite all that if more people simply joined in then these issues would diminish.