Anyone for free match tickets – and the new home top?

The jury is out on the Sunderland home shirt for next season.

For the lads at Tombola, the kit sponsors, it’s just the job with a “snazzy new black V-neck”. Others, whose views have been voiced at the usual places, have been less complimentary, from “yep it’s a dog” to the stern, fatherly: “I think it’s overfussy and, well, awful quite frankly. I got my son the current one. No chance with this. Looks dated already.”

I find myself siding with the man who said he paid little attention to each season’s changes to the home strip (though he’s a great admirer of the current away top, which will soon be seen no more) and cared a good deal more about the contents.

All of which, as we approach the first anniversary of a half-promise from the PR people at Tombola that the SAFC-mad boss Phil Cronin would give us an interview, serves a reminder of a little matchday tickets competition the company is running.

The first time we plugged this for them, again in return for a photo of what our players wear, it was said to be purely for the Wigan Athletic game at the SoL on April 23. That seems to have been extended so that you can now have a go for tickets for each of the remaining home games:

Just visit the Tombola site – this is the link – where you can play bingo if that’s your thing, or just enter the draw. A pair of tickets in home seating is the prize: matchday and closing dates in each case are:

West Bromwich: Saturday 9th April – (entries close 04/04/2011)
Wigan: Saturday 23rd April – (closes 18/04/2011)
Fulham: Saturday 30th April (closes 26/04/2011)
Wolverhampton: Saturday 14th May (closes 10/05/2011)

And if Phil is reading, maybe he can just give those PR people, who find it such a struggle to reply to e-mails, a gentle boot up the backside.

Monsieur Salut