It's a 300 mile journey.  To drive from Cardiff to Sunderland would take about six hours.  On a good day. 

So, if you're running a football team from Sunderland and you've just won in Cardiff perhaps you would treat yourself to a flight home from the (relatively) nearby Bristol airport.  Especially if you are a retired professional footballer and chariman of the club.

But then the flight is cancelled.  What do you do?  Spend a couple of hundred quid on a hotel room and make the best of it?  Bristol is a town with some great night life - it could be a silver-lined crowd if ever their was one.

No - you get a fleet of taxis to take you and all the other Sunderland fans back up north.  The cost?  Depending on where you read the story it's either £8 or £18 thousand pounds.  I wouldn't like to have to nod-through that expense claim, but the publicity is priceless.  Especially when you consider that the chairman, who had taken on the managers job in an unprecedented early season move, had been marching the club towards relegation before another untested boss turned around their on-field fortunes.  What a way to say sorry!