Quinn's gesture helps bring fans flocking back

6:02am Wednesday 4th April 2007

FOLLOWING Niall Quinn's £8,000 goodwill gesture to stranded Sunderland fans on Saturday night, the Stadium of Light is braced for a crowd of more than 40,000 for Mick McCarthy's return to Wearside this weekend.

With season ticket sales also rapidly increasing ahead of tomorrow's deadline, Black Cats striker Anthony Stokes has described how Quinn's bountiful actions highlight how unified the club is towards delivering promotion back to the Premiership.

Quinn had already established himself as a fan-friendly chairman after embarking on a series of roadshows in an attempt to drum up support from those disaffected by the previous regime.

But the Irishman's reputation rose even higher on Saturday, after he paid around £8,000 for a fleet of taxis to take 80 fans back to the North-East after the 1-0 success over Cardiff City.

Quinn intervened on the easyJet flight from Bristol to Newcastle as police removed some of the fans who had been singing his name moments earlier.

Although not intended as such, it has proved a good PR exercise and on Monday the queues for tickets for the visit of Wolves were hours long, with 2,500 being sold on the day.

The chances of the biggest crowd of the season are growing with sales standing at 34,000.

Stokes, looking forward to trying to extend Sunderland's unbeaten run to 15 matches in 2007, feels Quinn deserves enormous credit for the way he reacted.

"It shows the chairman is taking an interest in the fans. There can't be many chairmen who would have done that," said the £2m recruit from Arsenal.

"It's great to see the chairman and the supporters have that type of relationship. That bodes well for the rest of the club. There are a lot of hard games coming up so we want the fans behind us and this will certainly help. I'm sure the fans really appreciate it.

"It is not just that incident which has got the fans going, we are all bringing the club up to the level they all expect. From the manager, through to the players and up to the fans, we are all pulling in the same direction."

McCarthy's first visit to the Stadium of Light since his departure during the ill-fated Premiership campaign sees the sides meet with promotion firmly in their sights.

With four wins and a draw in March, Keane has again been short-listed for the manager of the month award after winning his first accolade in management for February.

Those five matches reflect the outstanding start to the new year Sunderland have made. In fact no Sunderland team has gone 14 matches undefeated in the league since the record-breaking title-winners of 1999, when Peter Reid steered his side through a 17-game sequence.

But Stokes wants more, saying: "We are in a great position and we have worked extremely hard to get where we are.

"But we don't want to get to the summer and go on our holidays thinking 'if only we had put in a bit more of a shift in the last few games'. We all want to go up automatically. We've been promised an extra few weeks off so we will all be making sure we do it."

Stokes, with just one goal to his name since his move from the Gunners, alerted Keane with his 16 goals in 18 games for Falkirk.

Having settled in and learnt the hard way about his new manager's hard-line approach to time-keeping last month, the Republic of Ireland forward is keen to make his mark.

"I knew there was a great bunch of lads here because I had been here before I had signed a few times," said Stokes. "There's a great team spirit on the pitch, everyone can see that all of us work so hard for each other and the fans appreciate that.

"The Arsenal fans get a bit of stick for being quiet but since I came here I don't think I have been to a game where the fans have stopped singing. That's down to us as well, though, because we are doing well."

Tickets for Sunderland's trip to Southampton on Monday are on sale at the Stadium of Light ticket office until noon today

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