The Ithics Files: the last post, or can someone help?

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Salut! Sunderland is following normal practice and avoiding premature comment on the signings from Manchester United that seem imminent. For now, we have a minor problem – and you may be able to solve it …

This, with the previously missing third page of the article (shown on the second image) is a corrected repetition of the item already published as No 8 in the series of extracts from the fanzine It’s The Hope I Can’t Stand.

But the cupboard is now bare. I wanted to end the series with two more pieces: the Kevin Ball article that drew a sharp but ultimately friendly response from the man himself and a suitable farewell, assuming one appeared, from the final edition. That is the only ITHICS I have not got, and Nic Wiseman, the co-editor who has supplied me with all these scanned pages to enable you to read some of the best of the fanzine, cannot locate his copy.

If anyone else has it – and we are talking about ITHICS No17 – they’d be doing us a much-appreciated favour if they could scan the Bally piece and any article dealing with the magazine’s closure. Use the email link in the Contact section near the top of the right-hand sidebar or copy colinrandall1@gmail.com … thanks in anticipation.

And here again is my account of Nic’s article – Why Do We Support Sunderland – looking at the international and sometime surprising reach of SAFC;s support base …

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The Ithics Files: (8) why some unlikely people support Sunderland

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Time for another extract from the fund of material to be found in the complete works of It’s The Hope I Can’t Stand, a fine but shortlived Sunderland fanzine from the back end of the 1990s.

Nic Wiseman, the co-editor, is the man who came up with the copies for M Salut and then took the trouble to scan and e-mail selected articles.

This is one of his own.

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The Ithics Files: (5) noise, belligerence and Bovril at the SoL

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Nic Wiseman has worked like a Trojan to help get this series under way, choosing and scanning and sending cracking extracts from It’s The Hope I Can’t Stand, the SAFC fanzine he co-edited in the last 1990s.

Here’s one Nic wrote himself, an entertaining tour of the matchday experience of different areas of the Stadium of Light. So that makes it timeless, too; many, especially those of us swimming in the East Stand Bovril, will relate to his guide years later.

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The Sunderland fanzine born of hope, with a suspiciously Newcastle look



Among all that has been written about Sunderland AFC, there was once a fanzine called
It’s The Hope I Can’t Stand. It was launched as the club moved from Roker Park to the Stadium of Light and was a publication destined for an exhilarating but short-lived life. There is no anniversary to speak of, no particular reason to look back on a bold publishing venture. But a discussion at the Blackcats e-mail list, which played a crucial part in the birth of ITHICS, prompted Salut! Sunderland to ask Nic Wiseman, the fanzine’s co-editor, to recall that heady time …

It was the end of the 1996-97 season, the Premier Passions season, the last season at Roker Park.

A group of Sunderland supporters bonded by being members of an e-mail list called Blackcats trooped out of the Fulwell End for the last time having seen the team dispatch Everton 3-0. It was a result that gave us hope of avoiding the drop and thus beginning life in our shiny new stadium in the Premiership rather than the Nationwide First Division, as the second tier was known then.

We had been in abysmal form and this win had given us a fighting chance. As we descended the steps into Association Terrace one of our number – I thought it was Mark Egan but others challenge my memory and tell me it was, in fact, Emma Nichol – spoke for all of us when she sighed: “I wouldn’t care if we were relegated already, it’s the hope I can’t stand.”

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