TICKET OFFICE RANT BY BEN HARDIE Sunderland AFC recently announced that the ticketing section of their website would be temporarily going down so they could merge the website log in (that lets you watch content on the site etc) and the ticketing log in. This sounded good on paper, all you’d have to do is reset the password on your account and you’d be good to go and life would be easier. Surely this wouldn’t cause any issues, how could it? Well when the website came back up I did what we were told to do, I went to log in, clicked reset password with the email associated with my account and then was told I’d be sent a code to enter alongside my new password. One minute later, no code. No worries, sometimes these things take a few minutes to go through and I’m sure everyone else is also going through this process so that’s probably slowing it down. Half an hour later, still no code. Following this I went onto social media to check if anyone else was having the same issues and this told me two things. One, loads of people were having the same problem as me. No code was being sent. Two, many, many other issues had somehow arisen. As I’m scrolling through my phone I’m seeing a new problem someone’s had with this change all of the time. Just off the top of my head, people have been sent the code but it doesn’t work, people’s season tickets and loyalty points have been taken off their accounts, someone’s had the wrong date of birth (in the future) assigned to them so they can no longer use the account functionally and a number of people have been given either a new account with a new number or been given an account in their name but it’s not the one they use. After reading through all of these issues (and I’m almost certain there’s more) it makes me wonder how the club can get so much right but also somehow have failed to fix the issues with ticketing since our League One days. In a number of ways it’s actually got worse, quite frankly. It also makes me wonder why on earth they didn’t just do this during the summer and not in the month the season starts. Brentford away is in less than 30 days, what happens if people can’t use their accounts to buy tickets? Did the club seriously not account for any potential problems that might arise? We’ve got home games on sale now, barely anyone is going to the Rennes game because of the way they are selling the tickets (piecemeal rather than just opening up the lower bowl, how much does it cost a Premier League club to hire some extra stewards?) and now half of the fanbase can’t even get onto their accounts. Amateur hour quite frankly. I’m sure it’ll be sorted eventually but this is honestly one of the most perplexing things that’s ever occurred with our ticket office, it wasn’t a necessary change and it’s definitely a case of the treatment being worse than the condition. Also, if you’ve got a bigger issue, such as season tickets disappearing, you’re probably going to have to go and wait in a long queue to get it fixed which shouldn’t ever have to happen. Seriously, sort it out. As a man once said on a BBC programme about cars, how hard can it be?