Sunderland: 10 Things That Will Definitely Happen This Season

9. Fans Systematically Pull The Team Apart

An opening day defeat will take the entire club back to square one, and social media will explode. Despite good debuts for Lens, Younes Kaboul, Seb Coates, Adam Matthews, and Yann M'Vila, there'll be a noisy minority claiming they're all awful, inexperienced, wastes of money and that we should have kept the awful, inexperienced, waste of money, Connor Wickham. If there's anything left of the Ready To Go message-board other than a smouldering crater, one grizzled keyboard warrior will solemnly rise up and declare that we should never have got rid of Poyet, or that Martin O'Neill wasn't given enough time. The pre-season excitement will come to an abrupt end and a miserable shadow will be cast over Wearside for the opening weeks.