Opinion | Home and Away: Fans have the club deep in their veins
Sunderland supporters travel over 1,000 km to see their team lose 8-0, and continue to sing and cheer. An example of true football fanatics
A polite word with the waiter at the Lexus Hotel in Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa ensured normal service was resumed during the transmission of the weekend's English Premier League instalment.
The group gathered around the TV in the lobby bar showing QPR v Liverpool last weekend was puzzled as to why the sound was off and the loud lobby muzak hogged the airwaves.
The crowd, mostly delegates at the "Ethiopian International Peacekeeping Training Conference", were too polite to broach the subject of volume.
What is it about Sunderland fans that make them so diehard? What made them stay to the bitter end, singing with such pride?
So pundits Gerry Francis and Graeme Souness appeared like specimens in an aquarium, their mouths working industrially to produce only silence.
Experience told the visitor this was clearly a partisan crowd, part of the great Liverpool diaspora.
With a capacity crowd of only 18,360 at Loftus Road and none here in the bar and likely throughout Ethiopia, QPR would need every "ooh" and "ahh" and "go on!" they could get - plus there was no love lost after Anfield's summer transfer raid of St Mary's.
The exclamations aimed at the silent screen proved contagious so the waiter, Aberra, was asked if the sound could be turned up.