It’s obviously a combination of both plus many other things.
Why do you keep using the word ‘excuses’? Do you realise that there’s a word that exists called ‘reasons’?
You go to the games, you’ve seen the set up of the stadium, you’ve heard the songs… you must have experienced and witnessed that our current singing section is in the worst place in the stadium for creating a stadium-wide atmosphere. It’s a little bit of a small tier in a big stand blocked in between the away fans to one side, the quietest stand in the stadium to the other side, a corporate section and small tier above and nothing below - it’s basically an away section, smaller than the actual away section to its right, of home fans.
Songs do not spread round to anywhere from there, often they don’t even spread as far as a couple of blocks within the singing section. Under that overhang at the back of 115, fans just two blocks away cannot hear the songs that are started by the back of 115 so the current singing section can’t even join in with songs started in that same section as they can’t hear them. And even when they do they are often drowned out by the larger away section to its right or gets mixed in with chants started in the 109-111 area and SSL3.
Sometimes the South Stand of the stadium sounds like this; ‘follow follow follow, say that you want me, U-N-I-T-E-D, CIIIITY CIIITY, we’ve got the best football team in the world, all of the time, United are the team for me, the best team in the land, we’ve got Rodri and Gundo, say that you need me, with a nick back paddy wack give the dog a bone, and all the world, Phil and Bernardo, always be mine, why don’t City fuck off home, CIIIITY CIIIITY, Kevin de Bruyne John Stones, cos we’ve got Guardiola…’
Where do you join in and with what do you join in with when SSL1 are singing ‘follow follow follow’, 109-111 are singing ‘we’ve got Guardiola’, SSL3 are singing ‘the best team in the land’ and United in the away section are singing nursery rhymes louder than any of our three areas?
At other times it’s silent and could do with help from other areas of the ground but you will also have probably tried to get a song going in another random area of the ground and it’s not taken off (I tired it with Que Sera Sera on Saturday).
The current singing section has no roof above it (listen to the noise SSL3 belt out when they sing and away fans in the Cups when they get the entire tier below the roof). It has no adjoining areas that join in with the chants. A lot of the chants that get going are hard to decipher and hard to join in with as that section has started to forget about songs that City fans across the stadium can hear well when they’re started in that area and that City fans across the stadium like to sing.
Even saying all that, the atmosphere has been much better in general at the Etihad in 2022 and 2023, apart from the run of games either side of the World Cup, than it was before Covid. Plus as bad the location is where the singing section currently is, like in the last two home games in the last week, they often sing all game in there.
That new stand is going to make a
huge difference to our stadium.
It will be a large area where singers are going to gravitate. It’s going to unite singers from dotted about areas in the ground. Thousands of other Blues who consider themselves vocal fans have never bothered going to SSL1 because it’s such a small area that has so much not going for it and has never been worth being part of. Yet all of us from my group are going to move to this new stand and I’ve even got mates who said they’ll come back to our match going support to be part of that stand. It’ll be the largest tier in the stadium and will have a roof above it with a big back to the stand that should boom out noise:
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Will it have games where the atmosphere won’t be great? Of course it will. Will it still have a period of twenty minutes straight (ten minutes either side of half time) where not a single song is sung like happens now? Of course it will. But will it be infinitely better than what we have now? Of course it will! Especially if it’s priced right.
