It's not a big enough reason for somebody to want to leave clubs Dave. I have no doubt the players you have mentioned have a very deep affection towards our club.....alongside a very healthy pay cheque at the time.
Everybody likes to feel appreciated however and none of them are going to prefer that those in the crowd left early (let's put it that way). You only have to look at their reaction after Fulham and most of the away games to see that they do care.
I am going to get splinters in my arse here from sitting on the fence, but I can see it from both sides with this debate rumbling on so long. FWIW I think we have the best fans in the league - and some of the most I misunderstood fans in the league, well, at least since we became successful. And everyone shows their devotion in different ways. Some of us go to every home, some of us go to every away, some of us never leave early, some of us have never let an ST lapse, some of us take our parents, some of us take our kids, run OSCs, travel hundreds of miles or fly from different countries, pay through the nose...we all have our ways.
So if you do something week in, week out for decades, and it's part of your routine, then it's inevitable that you're going to need to claw a few minutes back here or there, or get to the game a bit later, or want to have a pint, or whatever it is that might prevent you from staying in your seat for the entire afternoon - we are not robots and dedicated matchgoing is a big time and money commitment. We have early leavers precisely because we have so many fans who have been going for so long and so often you do what you have to do to make it work with everything else in your life.
But, and this is the point, I am of a mind that it might not always look that way to Pep and the boys, and as a supporter that bothers me. Sometimes it is about picking your moments. Was I little disappointed that so many of us chose to leave early at Villa? Well, yeah, because the atmosphere was great that day, it wasn't just another game - I felt the manager and the players deserved our respect and support, and if I was still working away on the pitch at a time like that and saw lots of people skipping up the stairs, and rows of empty seats, I might feel a bit hurt by it. And if I ever saw a player say, 'I loved playing in Manchester and playing for City, but the fans are dead quiet and look like they can't wait to get off', that would bother me too. So I hope I never heard that said.
On the way back from the Newcastle game the other day I heard some Geordie twat on Pollard Street saying 'it's a tourist club, it just feels like something you do if you're in Manchester and you're at a loose end, blah blah'. Which is total BS. But he probably felt he could say that, even though it was BS, because he sees seats emptying early and folk sitting in silence. Which happens at all clubs. But that doesn't bother me - because they're not my club. End of the day though - we all know these are magical times we shouldn't be complacent about. And we get far too much stick from elsewhere to be turning on each other.
