It's a Saturday but Sky's new EFL contract commits them to broadcasting all matches on the first and last day of the season.
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.
Because of the Saturday 3pm blackout and the fact Sky haven't yet decided on specific screening times
All 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
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.
I'd only just decided to buy my first ever SC after 50 odd years of support ... ... looking at things again I'm not so sure. TBH I could probably attend every home game, for free, with the help of various mates, who have SCs their friends and families can't always use. But I wanted to support my club financially and not just at the away games I favour. But early SOL kickoffs mean crawling out of bed at 5/6am and hoping the trains are running properly. 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 have around a dozen 'local' mates who I'll see at home games ... sadly I've just lost MrRAWhite and Tom Lynn. The rest are from Nottingham, Mansfield, Oxford, Bristol, Hastings, Surrey, Devon, Cornwall, London, Isle of Wight, Scotland, etc. Sorry RTB mate, I can never remember where you're from. I'm just one of many exiles and I think 'locals' would be amazed how many of us there are. There are great posters, on here, from Australia, France, Spain even Cumbria I used to run a coach, from Mansfield, to every Sunderland game and 'our branch' ran for about five years ... ... just one little part of the big machine
I wish our league fixtures was 17:30 that day. Would’ve made things a lot easier getting to/staying over at Cardiff Never mind
