Sorry for your loss Mick, lost my Dad 4 years ago to a brain tumour, awful.
These crowd debates prove nothing and have no bearing on an individual’s support so let me get that out of the way. I attended most home games during the early 80’s and have to say that our crowds deserved to be less. You really needed to be a special kind of idiot to stand in the shit hole of a ground, watching awful football against a backdrop of racism, NF, hooliganism, soaring inflation, unemployment, boardroom troubles and boycotts. You really needed to be around to understand how bad it was.
Say something enough times and it becomes an accepted truth and so it goes with our attendances which are never viewed contemporaneously against other clubs/ divisions.
Funnily enough an awful lot of disinformation can be found on our dear neighbours SMB messsageboard which is a tribute to attendance threads, how great are we (just search class) and how hard they’ve been over the years. If you’ve got a spare 10 mins take a peak. Don’t let facts get in the way of a good old fable.
One of my main bug bears is that the media, SKY led, continually insists on building us up and interview some right nuggets perpetuating the myth that we are all deluded Geordie Nation knackers. It’s lazy, disingenuous, journalism.
We’re hopefully at the start of an exciting future. I don’t think any of us would have chosen our new owners, we don’t get a choice (no matter what anyone says) but when the chance came to get Ashley out I’ll freely admit, I was all in. I think we’d all take top 8-10 this season and steady improvement in the squad. We’re performing better than the sun of our parts just now.