grim up north said:
ninjamonkey said:
Sunderland are a good set of proper fans in general. 1800 for an early kick off is respectable. Imagine if the shoe was on the other foot. Paying £50+ for a ticket, going to play a team who have an unbelievable home record, having to make a 4 hour+ coach journey at silly o'clock in the morning just to make it for kick off. Their support on the day was unusually quiet for them but they went a goal down within 5 minutes and looked like taking a hammering from the off. Plenty of times that's happened to City away and our support has gone quiet.
Lets not criticise a team who on the whole have a very good set of true football fans and are not to dissimilar to what we were like a few years ago before the success.
its a 2 hour drive it took us 2 1/2hrs in a minibus with a 60 mph limiter on.
they are more fickle than the geordies have you seen the attendances at their home games
They're no more fickle than anyone else IMO. They've always been pretty well supported from my own memory and that's going back to the 80's. In fact, when they flirted with relegation to the 3rd division in the early 90's their home crowds held up better than Newcastle's when they were in the same position at a similar time - Newcastle's home crowds dropped to as low as 10,000 whereas Sunderland's didn't.
As others have said, there's a general apathy amongst the fans of many Premier League clubs and that has been the case for some time. Sunderland have spent quite a bit of money under both Keane and Bruce over recent seasons and their fans are entitled to think they should've
achieved a bit more considering the outlay - a bit like us when Keegan got us promoted. Looking at yesterday, an early kick-off, expensive ticket price, and a match against a team that hasn't lost a home league game in almost 20 months is the perfect recipe for Sunderland fans to give the game a miss. It was the same with us pre-takeover. Wigan away in 2006 saw us take a similar amount of fans on a much shorter journey for a 4-0 thumping.