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Opinion

View from a new Newcastle United fan

4 years ago
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Having moved to the area just over a year ago and my wife being a long time Newcastle United fan, we thought it would be great to go along and watch them play.

We both are totally in support of Mike Ashley going and getting the Sports Direct branding off St James Park and fully understand the fans who are boycotting the games.

It is interesting that that as members we don’t seem to get many benefits apart from early ticket sales.

We wanted a half season ticket but we were never given the chance to buy one because of the great Mike Ashley give away.

I don’t understand the logic of giving existing season ticket holders a free half season ticket, surely it would have made more sense to offer them to members and then have a lottery for the remaining ones, or just offer them for sale first before anything else, as a new visitor to St James Park I am disappointed with the way fans are treated.

We were given a stadium tour as a present and they are quite happy to show the best bits, what they don’t want you to see is the poor state of some of the seats and infrastructure. Lovely on the outside with all its trick painting the murals and so on.

Three times I have been now to matches and one seat had tears in it, the second was broken and unusable and we missed the first 20 minutes waiting to be moved, knowing we had the same seats again next time, I contacted NUFC and they assured me that the maintenance team had already fixed, or would fix it, before the match.

No they didn’t, so the same faff trying to get moved again and missing parts of the match, I have contacted the club again but to date no one has contacted me, not even just to apologise.

Sunderland fans have been successful in getting their club put up for sale and on the way to getting rid of the their Mike Ashley equivalent, what more can we do to change our ownership? Boycotting alone is not going to do it.

It has been quite interesting listening to people talking around us whilst at the games, as it is quite apparent that they are not fans, but just people that have got free or cut price tickets.

They also appear to be a lot of students and employees of local companies.

The 10,000 give away and Ashley’s persistent freebie match tickets can never be beaten.

If he can afford a £20,000,000 hole in his pocket called Joelinton, then he can afford to keep giving away tickets.

What it needs is for him to be challenged and actually come up with a figure he wants for the club so that a consortium of rich investors and 52,000 true supporters can find the money to get him, Charnley and Bruce out and then when he refuses to sell get him investigated into why he won’t.

I pray for the day that we are free from this idiot and cannot wait to kick the Sports Direct branding off the stands.

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