It is early November 2019, a brisk day on the banks of the River Wear, and Gillingham are in town for an FA Cup first-round game. Nearing the end of a dour 1-1 draw, a lame effort from the visitors bounces into the Stadium of Light’s Roker End. Only one side of Sunderland’s 49,000-seater ground is open to home supporters on a day when attendance was just 7,892, and it isn’t that side.
Beyond the FA Cup, this was just 15 months into a League One
stint which ultimately spanned four years.
Seven years on, no seat remains vacant.
From atop the same stand, under a darkened sky, amid a swell
of anticipation and almost a lifetime of it not happening here, the first
two-tier ‘tifo’ (banner) in English football unfurls. “New shores to conquer”
bellows in bold typeface, abutting a depiction of ships on a wave of blue
flags. Above and behind, a lighthouse, akin to the one found two miles away,
not far from the now-demolished Roker Park home that last hosted a game like
this, backdrops proceedings. Fireworks roar overhead. The din pierces the soul,
petrifies silence.
It is a gesture to this city’s shipbuilding past, as well as
an entreaty to an unbounded future. It is European football for the first time
in over half a century, and for only the second season ever here. It is a club
reborn in record time.
Working with the club to build the atmosphere and bring the
noise is This Is Wearside, a fan group set up in early 2024, a time when, as
distant as it seems now, supporter-club relations were badly fractured.
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