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Opinion

Newcastle United member – Adrenaline Junkie

12 months ago
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My god, nothing quite beats that rush you get as a Newcastle United member.

My name is Shaun and I am an NUFC Adrenaline Junkie.

I honestly just live day to day, week to week, for this moment.

Yes, I think I have a problem, but that always disappears when I get that next hit.

I mainlined it into my veins at 10am this Thursday morning and I still haven’t come down from it.

It wasn’t one of my biggest ever highs but it still did the trick…for now.

That moment, that beautiful moment, when I found out my queue position for Newcastle v Southampton tickets.

Yes, this is how I live dangerously these days, where I get my kicks from.

Once upon a time myself and friends / family were all season ticket holders, all with a canny few loyalty points (some more than others), but it had to be done.

Mike Ashley had to go and the only way this was going to happen was if we went first.

Sure enough, the FCB held his sweaty mitts up very quickly, after the mass desertion of thousands of season ticket holders in 2019, Ashley then rewarded those who had stayed loyal to him, by handing out over ten thousand free half season tickets.

Am I bitter? Not really. Although it would have been great to see a totally empty St James’ Park, the fanbase United in getting rid of him, instead of thousands of you looking after yourselves instead. Making sure you still had your season tickets and loyalty points if the FCB ever went the distance and we had hope again.

I totally understand it, I would love to be able to press a button and all of our lot had their season tickets and loyalty points back BUT that is a utopia, not a reality.

How would the new Newcastle United owners know who was really a fan who gave up their season ticket for the greater good, to get rid of Mike Ashley. Rather than somebody who just didn’t want to watch the rubbish football under Brucey. Or indeed the many thousands of fans who gave up their season tickets earlier in the Ashley reign.

I would though still rather be outside a St James’ Park as we have now, rather than inside a one where I was giving my money to Ashley and Bruce.

Anyway, I am here to talk about the positives.

I am no longer a season ticket holder (not through choice), nor I am somebody who makes it to pretty much every NUFC away game (not through choice), nor am I out drinking in the Toon four or five times a week and going clubbing at least two or three times (my wife’s choice!).

Instead, as well as looking forward to a nice hot bath, combined with reading a book and drinking a bottle of red wine, I get my highs these days from that Newcastle United member rush.

For those of you who are season ticket holders, any of you will be oblivious to this.

As a Newcastle United member, you have to log-in at 10am on the appointed day match by match tickets go on sale, or in reality for most, we log-in ahead of 10am and then wait for that adrenaline rush at 10am.

This is when you get allocated your place in the queue to get onto the ticketing site to buy your tickets for that particular match.

We have three separate memberships and I use three different devices (phone, i-pad etc) to log-in under the three different Newcastle United member accounts.

It is so often a real hold your breath moment and then the ecstasy, or otherwise, as you evaluate your queue number(s). Certain to get tickets, probably get them, or no chance.

For the likes of the Man U, Tottenham, Liverpool and Southampton semi, I have had places in the queue ranging from 73 to 27,245.

When I got that 73, my god, what a rush that was! The 27,245, not quite so much.

For Southampton this morning, I wasn’t expecting any great rush, it looked an easy hit. So it proved. The three queue numbers were in the 2,000s, 4,000s and 5,000s. Any of these would have guaranteed tickets but I obviously bought all our three tickets when getting to my first front of the queue position.

Southampton at home at 2pm on a Sunday was never going to be crazy popular, plus I think this time it hadn’t been very well publicised. Not that as a Newcastle United member you are going to want to encourage that kind of thing (publicising on sale dates) anyway.

From what I can tell, it took a couple of hours for this Southampton match to sell out, as opposed to the 25-50 minutes or so on the very busy ones.

No on sale dates yet for Arsenal but I will be buzzing for that one.

Living for that special moment.

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