Tottenham vs SAFC ‘Guess the Score’: routine defeat or Houdini escape act begins

Here’s a deal. I will offer a prize mug for each remaining game in which we start with a mathematical chance of staying up. I will even send mugs off to those kind enough to have become Friends of Salut! Sunderland – eyes right please – just as soon as I can persuade myself I have time.

Tottenham Hotspur vs Sunderland is not a game from which we would normally expect even a point. It’s been done – I was at the snowy 3-3 when we were 3-1 up, but that was some time ago – and there was the 2-1 win when Djibril Cisse scored the winner in 2008.

Monday night’s game seems to fall into a different category, one that goes something like:

Your team’s been doing badly. Lacking confidence. Cannot score. Expect to lose or only draw almost every game. Don’t worry – Sunderland are up next.

And even the gloomiest of Spurs fans probably expects a simple enough win on Monday.

Guess the score in the comments below. Post the correct one before anyone else, and before kickoff time, and that mug is yours …

… with a modified design if you happen to support Spurs. Plenty of time so I will keep this item at the top of the home age: https://safc.blog

Here’s how I previewed the match in my regular slot at ESPN

All is not yet quite lost, bleak as the outlook appears.

A century ago, Harry Houdini made the only known recordings of his voice, practising speeches about his celebrated Chinese Water Torture Cell escape.

Perhaps Poyet should devote the coming few days to getting his hand on the Edison wax cylinders on which the recordings were made and play them over and again to his team.

I may be kidding myself, of course. I have been resigned to relegation for much of the season, gaining confidence only during that short-lived spell between Christmas and the league cup final (or perhaps, the manner of the defeat at Arsenal a week before Wembley). But we have to keep plugging away, hoping a potentially ruinous drop is avoidable even at this late hour.

The Spurs “Who are You?” will appear tomorrow. Here’s an extract:

Salut! Sunderland:
You can imagine how low morale is among our fans just now. Did you expect your former player Gus Poyet to make a better fist of it or was the squad, and the league position, he inherited from PDC just too hopeless?

Marc Aron, from espurs.com: The talent level at Sunderland isn’t high enough to compete with most teams in the Premier League. I think Jozy Altidore is a quality player (consider and discuss – ed) but not sure where he fits in. He is too similar to Steven Fletcher. Adam Johnson is a quality footballer but very inconsistent. Fabio Borini looks like a different player now and is one of the bright spots that I think wouldn’t be there if Gus wasnt leading. I think Gus has them playing spirited football and leaving it all out there which is what is needed in any relegation race. He is doing his best with what he has.

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