Wigan sell out and ask for extra Newcastle away ticket allocation

It is Newcastle v Wigan on Saturday, the first home match since defeat to Fulham three weeks ago.

On Tuesday morning, Wigan said they had only 40 tickets remaining for the trip to St James Park and then this was followed later by confirmation that these last few tickets had also gone.

Desperately fighting relegation, Wigan have now put a third ticket update of the day out, saying they have now been given an extra allocation of tickets for Saturday’s match.

Before you start imagining a sea of blue and white to greet Gabriel Obertan’s return to St James Park, it may not quite be the case.

Neither Wigan or Newcastle confirmed exactly how any the original allocation of tickets was – but both Preston and Burton have said that they have taken only the minimal allocation of just over a thousand for their visits.

Wigan are likely to have been no different and will surely still have no more than half or so of the away end.

More disappointingly, Newcastle giving the away team an extra allocation only four days before the game, suggests that the match is nowhere near a sellout.

Hopefully the sunshine over Tyneside today will encourage any dithering Newcastle fans to commit and help us get over this promotion line.

As featured earlier, these next two games (Wigan and Burton) will see Newcastle pass the one million mark this season for home league games, beating both the figure that watched the team over 23 games in Chris Hughton’s 2008/09 season, plus surpass the modern day record of just over one million fans who watched Manchester United’s 21 home games at Old Trafford in their 1974/75 promotion season.

So far, a total of 920,032 have attended the first 18 Championship games at St James Park at an average of  exactly 51,113.

Championship matches at St James Park 2016/17 so far:

52,079 Newcastle v Huddersfield

48,209 Newcastle v Reading

49,196 Newcastle v Brighton

52,117 Newcastle v Wolves

48,236 Newcastle v Norwich

51,885 Newcastle v Brentford

51,963 Newcastle v Ipswich

51,257 Newcastle v Cardiff

52,092 Newcastle v Blackburn

52,145 Newcastle v Birmingham

52,179 Newcastle v Sheffield Wednesday

52,228 Newcastle v Nottingham Forest

52,208 Newcastle v Rotherham

47,909 Newcastle v QPR

52,271 Newcastle v Derby

50,024 Newcastle v Aston Villa

52,131 Newcastle v Bristol City

51,903 Newcastle v Fulham

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