TODAY marks 19 years since Sunderland secured promotion to the Premier League with a 2-1 win over Leicester City.

Steven Caldwell headed the winner on that day for Mick McCarthy’s side who would finish the season as champions.

Our return to the top-flight was a two-year work in progress under McCarthy which had also included play-off heartbreak and a run to the FA Cup semi-final.

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Those two years in the second tier under McCarthy were restorative for Sunderland fans, who still carried the scars of finishing bottom of the Premier League in 2003 with a then-record-low 19 points.

McCarthy had built a decent side out of very little, relying on the loan market, free transfers and the likes of Liam Lawrence and Dean Whitehead, highly-rated but largely unproven talent from the lower reaches of the Football League.

It worked. And it was exciting. For me, it was the most fun I’d had as a Sunderland fan, largely because I was at university, beer was relatively cheap and petrol was less than half the price it is now so away games were actually affordable.

After big victories at Burnley and promotion rivals Wigan, all we needed to do was see off Leicester and promotion would be ours. You could feel the excitement building on Wearside around this time.

Yet the attendance that day was 34,815 – 6,000 fewer than we had through the turnstiles last weekend for what was, for all intents and purposes, a dead rubber.

On that day in 2005, the economy was booming. There was no credit crunch, no cost of living crisis. All of those events were still to come.

We Are Sunderland: Former Sunderland boss Mick McCarthy.Former Sunderland boss Mick McCarthy.

Yet during those McCarthy years in the Championship, a good chunk of the support just stayed at home. I remember seeing us play Plymouth Argyle in a midweek match, winning 5-1 in front of a crowd of 25,000. We were in second in the Championship.

It was rare for the attendance to go above the 30,000 mark – in fact, the first home game of the season saw us beat Crewe Alexandra in front of 22,341 at the Stadium of Light.

Why were the fans staying away?

It was a culmination of events, all stemming from the two seventh-placed finishes in the Premier League in 2000 and 2001 respectively. We didn’t build on that success. There was a perceived failure to invest in Bob Murray’s case – or, a perceived failure to use the money well in Peter Reid’s case – meaning the team went backwards, narrowly avoiding relegation in 2002 and then spectacularly imploding a year later.

Reid had been sacked midway through the 2002-3 campaign, replaced disastrously by Howard Wilkinson, to then be replaced by Mick McCarthy. But by then the damage had been done, McCarthy saw no improvement and lost every remaining game of the campaign.

In the final game of that 2003 season, Sunderland lost 4-0 to Arsenal in front of a crowd of 40,188.

The following league game at the Stadium of Light was in the then-named Division One against Millwall. The attendance that day? 24,877.

More than 15,000 fans had left the ground at the end of the previous season and just did not come back. They had had enough.

While there had been protests against the running of the club in 2003, improved performances on the pitch under McCarthy in 2003-4 and 2004-5 largely quelled any dissent. The fans just didn’t turn up. There was nothing to protest against, and seemingly little chance of any change at the top.

The protests, sure enough, started up again in the 2005-6 campaign after Murray handed McCarthy a transfer budget of just £10m – which was to also include fees and wages – to assemble a squad capable of staying in the division.

Of course, famously, we didn’t stay in the division. We bounced straight back out of it, and Murray – who had wanted to sell up for some time before this – finally handed control of the club over to Niall Quinn’s consortium, opening up a whole new chapter.

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Sunderland fans are loyal, we know this. But there’s a limit to that loyalty, as Murray found out 20 years ago.

It’s a cautionary tale that you can’t keep expecting supporters to blindly hand over their money when the club starts to make decisions that are detrimental to our fortunes.

The club’s current ownership would do well to note that fans’ patience is very much finite, and taking the current support levels for granted would be very foolish indeed.