We’re all familiar with the club’s famous motto, ‘Til The End.
It promotes the fighting spirit that the team has shown over the last couple of seasons and that almost took on a life of its own as we continued
to score late goals and achieve late victories that gave us memories we’ll never forget.
The fans were also part of this.
We’ve had to play our part by encouraging the players, bringing the noise from the terraces and lifting the team as at times they were on their last legs, so to speak. There’s a connection between the fans and the players and the club that I for one have never experienced before, so it’s with some puzzlement that I feel compelled to write about something that reared its ugly head again at the weekend: the thorny issue of fans leaving early.
Before any discussion about this, it’s important to recognise that there’ll be fans who have understandable reasons to leave a game early — they may have a role as a carer, or an important appointment.
If you’re one of these fans, what follows is not for you to get upset over. And of course, it’s very obvious that folk can do whatever they want to do, as it’s a free country. It’s your ticket and if you want to miss the end, who am I or anyone else to question that?
Except today, I’m going to question that, because I’m truly mystified as to why someone would want to leave early— and I’ll set out my argument.
First of all, the reason it came to the fore this weekend is that during the early part of the season, it had largely become a thing of the past. But against Crystal Palace — and I’ve heard several people say this from various parts of the ground — with about ten minutes to go, the gangways started to fill up.
They stop in the gangway when there’s action in a goal area, so the whole block has to stand up to see what’s going on, and I spent the last five minutes against Palace standing up because people were leaving early.
It’s not like they even know for certain how much added on time there might be, so if they leave with ten minutes to go and there are five to ten minutes of time added on, that’s close to twenty minutes they’re going to miss.
If we were losing 0-3 (or even winning 3-0), I could perhaps understand why some would try to get away early, but on Saturday, with a slender one-goal advantage, anything could still have happened. I think there were four added minutes, so someone who started to leave with ten minutes to go missed fourteen minutes of play.
Would anyone leave the cinema before the end of a film?
Have you left a theatre before the end of the performance? What about at a gig? “Let’s leave before the encore and get out of here”? These are similar occasions to a football match and to my way of thinking — “I’m going out to be entertained, so I’ll stay until the end to support my team and this wonderful set of players”.
Now — and I perhaps shouldn’t throw this into the mix — but when I was a teenager, I left Roker Park two or three times before the game had finished.
There was a train back to Newcastle at 5:00pm, so if I left early, I could run and get that with about ten other fans. The next train was 5:20 pm; it would be chock-a-block and I reckon I’d get home about an hour earlier if I missed the end of the game.
The third time I did this, we were losing 0-2 at home to Liverpool and I decided to leave early.
There was a guy on the platform who had a transistor radio, and he relayed to me what was going on: Stan Cummins had equalised in the last minute and I’d never be able to capture the euphoria that must’ve erupted inside Roker Park during those final five minutes.
I never left early again and I’ll never leave early again — not even when getting thumped at home by Blackburn or for any other reason. My fifteen-year-old stepson has been in tears at the end of some matches during the past six years but he knows we won’t be leaving early. We’ve come to see the match — and that’s what we’ll do.
These days, my own personal circumstances are such that I drive up from Worcestershire for every home game and going to a match demands the whole day at the very least, assuming I drive straight back home.
Sometimes I stay over, so a home game effectively takes up my whole weekend. I don’t want a Blue Peter badge; I merely want to make the point that one’s arrangements for a match day should include getting there and the getting back. If it means you get back home at 7:00pm due to heavy traffic, that becomes part of your day.
If I left early, I would avoid the jams driving through Boldon on the way to the A19 and I might even save myself an hour, but the queue is part of my journey and listening to Gary Bennett on BBC Radio Newcastle’s phone-in is part of my journey.
Of course, there are genuine reasons to leave early and there’ll be people who simply have to leave.
You may have to catch the last train back to London at 5:15pm, but surely in the numbers that I’m talking about. It would be interesting for some early leavers to tell us why they do so, or else we can’t address the problem. Is it public transport? Although as I’ve already eluded to, this isn’t really an excuse in my mind.
I’m often reminded of an old black and white episode of Tarzan of the Jungle that used to be on the TV when I was little, but I’ve never forgotten it.
Two suited and booted men came to look for Tarzan, and he was amazed that they’d travelled so far. They explained that it hadn’t taken them that long as they’d come in a “big metal bird in the sky”, so they’d saved themselves what otherwise would’ve been days of travel. Tarzan replied, “What do you do with time you saved?” — a lesson I’ve never forgotten.
When I missed the comeback against Liverpool through Cummins’ strike, I can’t remember that extra cup of tea or that extra hour relaxing, but I do remember that I’ll never capture the memory of the little magician’s goal. Is there anyone who missed Dan Ballard’s goal against Coventry? How many other exciting endings have there been? Is the time you save worth the possible memories you lose?
Like I say, there may be many legitimate reasons to leave but I suspect for the majority, it’s an habitual process or even a “herd mentality” as they see folk leaving and think, “Oh, we’d better get going too”.
I doubt that anyone reading this will decide to change their routine.
I suspect that if you leave early and are reading this, I’ve only annoyed you, but it would be good to hear why you do so — and not those few who need to leave. There aren’t hundreds or even a few thousand of you!
The players on the pitch will see the stadium emptying. They might be losing or they might be drawing, but the only thing they might think when they see fans leaving is “They don’t have belief we can get a winner here”, or even “The game is nearly over, the fans are satisfied and we can coast these last few minutes”,
I’m sure the likes of Granit Xhaka won’t let that happen, but we should at least play our part in this great Sunderland revival. We need to back the team ‘til the end.
