Steve Bruce, Spurs and Hull City. And the challenge of supporting England

You can only guess at Steve Bruce’s thoughts as a string of modest Premier League posts sailed into view only to vanish beyond the horizon of his employability. Having downsized his ambitions and taken the Hull City job, what did he then think when the higher profile Spurs managership became available? You can also wonder at the thoughts of earnest BBC bigwigs at a loss for something dramatic to pull on the eve of Euro 2012. Two Salut! Sunderland writers placed themselves in the relevant minds …

This is as near as you are likely to get to an edition this week of the Salut! Sunderland’s Week feature that generally appears during the football season.

No, that was not a petulant response to Salut!’s desultory hit rate on some but not all of the past seven days. Our writers may bust a gut in their unrewarded efforts to please but no one is forced to come here to see whether the endeavour was worthwhile.

But Monsieur Salut, modestly resisting any temptation to remind you of his own contributions, feels two articles in particular deserved a wider audience.

You are cordially invited to take a look at the following offerings:

Pete Sixsmith examines Steve Bruce’s gizzajob odyssey, delivers some sobering thoughts to Hull City fans and shares the relief Spurs supporters must be feeling. Extract …

Hull it was. Good stadium, although they had to share it with a Rugby League team, and relatively undemanding fans, who were far too busy being argumentative and miserable with one another (common traits in the good citizens of this fine East Riding city) to cast aspersions on his pie munching habits and his Geordie roots.

And then came the bombshell of all bombshells. Good Ol’ ‘Arry got the bullet. The Spurs job was available. If only he had waited he could have walked into that office at White Hart Lane and been the Spurs’ manager. They wouldn’t have bothered about whether he was a boyhood Newcastle fan. He could just sit there and manage. He imagined it …

Stephen Goldsmith took a long, cool look at racism in football, and what he sees as media sensationalism, but also entered a spirited defence of that maligned species, the travelling England fan. Extract …

I was in Portugal for Euro 2004 and was at the centre of the incident that you may recall being constantly shown as police clashing with England fans in the Algarve. I swear as a witness that the England fans did nothing wrong, nothing bar singing England songs in a non-aggressive manner.

While English police officers would be individually traced and held to account for such behaviour, the fans were the source of press scaremongering. There was no consideration of English fans; we were the targets. As Russia and Poland fans attacked each other this week, did English reporters stick microphones into the faces of Uefa officials and imply they should be kicking the said two teams out of the tournament? Probably not.

If either extract whets the appetite, click on the sub-heading to read the full article.