Sunderland have twice broken the record for the lowest points ever in a Premier League season, yet defeat to Swansea at the weekend meant they have now made their worst ever start to a Premier League season. Gus Poyet is the fourth person to take charge of a Sunderland team this year, and the ninth manager the club have had in ten years. There have also been three different owners and three different chairmen in that time. Don’t let that cloud your judgement though. When looking for a reason as to why things have gone so wrong, there is a simple answer. It is the supporters. The club has a huge number of fans, but unfortunately they don’t do much to help the club on, or off the field. Mainly because they are sensationalists, over-react to everything, and either don’t watch the actual football, or drink so much they forget about it. Fans at the Stadium of Light are a peculiar bunch that tries to live by three simple rules. Hate anyone who has been at the club for three or more years. Love all new arrivals unconditionally. If there is a bandwagon, jump on it and tell everyone you were on it first. They rarely pay attention to what is actually happening in the game, and base all opinions on a simple formula. 1+ (2 x3) = Opinion. There are one or two quirks to look out for, but should you ever find yourself watching a Sunderland game you can’t get away from, remember those rules and you won’t be far off. For your consideration the next bandwagon will be ‘I said all along we should have kept Steve Bruce’. That is, however, complete and utter rubbish. Nobody said that. It was the fans who got him the sack in the first place. To give a little background, in the 20 years between 1990 and 2010, Sunderland became the definition of a yo-yo club. They had been promoted or relegated in or out of the Premier League (or old Division 1) nine times in that period, finishing as high as seventh in the Premier League, and as low as 18th in the old Division 2. In 2010 things seemed to be changing as Steve Bruce was able to create some stability at the club. A year earlier Sunderland had survived on the final day with Ricky Sbragia, effectively a caretaker manager, in charge of the team. Now Sunderland were safe and sound in 13th. The style of football was not pretty, but it was effective. Darren Bent scored goals playing alongside Kenwyne Jones, although the side had an extremely defensive and scrappy approach. Had Bent and Jones stayed, then things may have been different. But they couldn’t stay. The fans didn’t want them. Jones had outstayed his welcome and would not start his fourth season, while Bent, who was a fan favourite in his first season, found himself third favourite behind new signings Asamoah Gyan and Danny Welbeck. Both Jones and Bent left within six months of each other. Adnan Januzaj of Manchester United scores his second goal against Sunderland (Getty Images) Bruce brought in new strikers each year to keep the fans interested, but even after finishing 13th and 10th in his first two seasons he could not beat rule number one and was sacked during his third season. He was the 21st Sunderland manager since 1973 to leave before the end of three seasons (there have now been two more). The abuse aimed at Bruce in his final months as manager was disgusting and embarrassing. It was often difficult to sit in the ground listening to the personal attacks on a man simply trying to do his job. Being the manager of Sunderland is, of course, an impossible job. The fans have incredibly unrealistic demands, and when they don’t get their own way, they cause trouble for the manager. Their opinion formula prevents any kind of stability, in either the squad or management, and even in the boardroom. They expect to be like Southampton or Swansea on the field, and yet don’t feel the need to behave like their fans off the field. What Sunderland need are a group of fans who will accept that there are two ways to stay in the Premier League. One way is to play scrappy and defensive football, Hull being the prime example this season, especially as Bruce is their manager. This involves very little patience and will bring the occasional good result against the bigger teams. The team will be a flat track bully in the Championship, and be safe with three games left in the Premier League. The only problem is it’s not nice to watch. The other option is to start again. Build an entire system and ethos in the club over a long period of time to play attractive and stylish football. Build a style of play the club and supporters believe in and be true to it. This requires a lot of patience and is not as secure as the first option. Blackpool were a brilliant example of a team who played good, exciting football when they came up to the Premier League, but they were often bullied out of games and sent straight back down. Wigan were another example, under Paul Jewell and Steve Bruce they bullied their way to safety with relative ease. Under Roberto Martinez they played prettier football, but were relegated within three years. Sunderland fans want that the style and ethos in the club, so much so they bullied Steve Bruce out of a job when he couldn’t provide it. But they desperately don’t want to be relegated. That is why they bullied Martin O’Neill out of his job without giving him a chance to create it. Paolo Di Canio was an appointment made out of desperation. He kept Sunderland in the Premier League just as Martin O’Neill probably would have, but his ego meant any good work he did was undermined by his behaviour. The one positive thing Di Canio did was making public to unprofessional behaviour of players. He openly told fans how unfit the players were and how they were often out drinking and eating badly. It was positive it two ways, it led to his sacking, and it has created a new super bandwagon – the gutless player wagon. Now that almost every Sunderland fan has a bandwagon so big to follow, the manager has some breathing space. As long as the fans continue to bully the players and pick on the five or six men now in their third season, Poyet can prepare for life in the Championship. He can blood new players this season and get Sunderland playing some nice football in the Championship before coming back into the Premier League a better, more stable club. Hopefully the team will come back stronger, with a more viewer friendly brand of football and a set of fans who can watch the game objectively and appreciate the bigger picture. http://www.roundeight.com/2013/10/sunderland-are-the-fans-the-problem/ Must be a dirty craa him like
I knew this article would contain a good dollop of ****e and I've just spotted it. "Darren Bent scored goals playing alongside Kenwyne Jones ......... but they couldn’t stay. The fans didn’t want them." Load of bollocks!
Hate anyone who has been at the club for three or more years. Love all new arrivals unconditionally. If there is a bandwagon, jump on it and tell everyone you were on it first. They rarely pay attention to what is actually happening in the game, and base all opinions on a simple formula. 1+ (2 x3) = Opinion TME, unsure as to whether you are extracting the urine or not but I don't consider myself to be any of the above. I also feel there are a lot more SAFC fans exactly like me.
I stopped reading rather quickly. A club that's been through as many relegations and false dawns as we have and still get 40k plus silences any negative fault that can throw at the fans. Every club has idiotic unreasonable minorities as well. If they want to point fingers at any team's minority embarrassments then it's the Nags with their hatred of horses, city centres and phone boxes. Not to mention their love for protest marches (against how their secure mid table club is being run) and pitch invasions.
I've witnessed 2 pitch invasions and one riot involving Newcastle ......... Sunderland supporters are canny on the whole.
It wouldn't kill the fans to sing a bit more. In the South Stand its bouncing, but that's it. The rest of the ground is like a graveyard. If we all sang and got behind the team, the players might actually grow a pair of testicles and do well.
What a pile of self-righteous crap. When I read ****e like this, from anyone who has supposedly sat or stood beside me on the terraces. It starts me thinking is there something really, really, mentally wrong with me, for wanting SAFC to move forward and not just tread water and hope for the best? Stinks of the I'm right, and the whole of the Stadium is wrong sort of bloke you here ranting bollox after the game in a pub. I love that he avoided mentioning Bent was trying to inveigle a move for a long time before we actually found out about it. Quinny told us later. Is the author calling Quinny a liar? Bruce was nearly as bad as the author for having a go at us. MON lost interest in football and was going through the motions, putting out a team displaying some incredible dour football with no end product. You just know for a fact he will have been one of the ones making a big deal out of PDC's political background. "Chris Siddell might be a part-time writer, but he is definitely a full-time sports fan. Now living in Dublin, Ireland via the UK, USA and Australia, Chris has a vast amount of experience in coaching and sports development, spending most of his career working in professional sports. Now a qualified teacher looking after school sport, Chris writes in what time he has left after training. An Ironman triathlete and marathon runner, he also finds time for cricket, soccer and Gaelic games between watching and writing about the sports he loves." I would love to see this IRONMAN say to my face or one of my mates that it is our fault for Sunderland's failures. Most of my mates are forty plus year'ers, that have cheered some of the most dire ****e any football fan has had to watch ever. And every one of us has at one time or another put BIG BLOKES on their arses for far less.
Our fans have been ****e in recent years, but not as ****e as some of the crap posted in that article..
