Yeh but why 12.30 koIt's a Saturday but Sky's new EFL contract commits them to broadcasting all matches on the first and last day of the season.
Because of the Saturday 3pm blackout and the fact Sky haven't yet decided on specific screening times
This will all cause people all kinds of different problems.
There are loads of exiles, many with SCs, who'll struggle to make early home kick offs.
Those in the NE will have to travel to places like Cardiff, Portsmouth, Plymouth or wherever starting off early.
That's a 6/7 hour drive leaving in the small hours around 5am and arriving home around 9/10pm.
It's OK booking trains and hotels, to make life easier, but people need to know quicker than has been the case previously.
That cost a lot of people last season.
Mate of mine, has lived in Sunderland for 20 year, used to travel to Manchester on a weekend (City season ticket), never missed because City were ****e so kick offs never never really moved from 3pm. He worked nights so always had the opportunity to put holidays in at work or just sleep on the bus for a couple of hours. Then the money came in, then the kick-off times changed, in the end he had to give up his season ticket.
Not everyone lives within walking distance of the ground, I'd guess around 20% would qualify as 'exiles'.
I seem to recall that the club published some figures on season ticket holders and how many lived away from Sunderland. It was a number of years ago now, and I'm not computer literate enough to find the article but the number of supporters that travelled some distance to home games was quite high.

I wish our league fixtures was 17:30 that day. Would’ve made things a lot easier getting to/staying over at CardiffAll the league two games are live at 15:00 so the blackout doesn’t apply that day.
league one games all live at 17:30
would have made more sense to have 4 games from each division at each kick off time rather than ****ty league 1 and 2 games in the other slots
Never mind