Another week, another injury, this time Lynden Gooch who will be out for up to three months after damaging an ankle ligament playing for the Under 23s last Monday. Before that, it was Paddy McNair, whose season ended with the injury picked up in the win against Hull City. Rachel Johnson* returns to our pages to report on mental challenge McNair faces as he battles to regain fitness …
Ask Jeremy ‘Clock Stand Paddock’ Robson where Sunderland play and he’ll say ‘Roker Park’
Time to give readers a tap on the shoulder and remind them to come up with an entry in our Things We Do For Love contest.
You see the prize above – a magnificent print of Roker Park – and we have already had some excellent entries which can be seen at the earlier posts: https://safc.blog/category/salut-competition/ – and Monsieur Salut’s work will have his work cut out when he gets round to choosing a winner.
Most of us are currently looking no further than Saturday’s visit from last season’s unexpected (but welcome) champions Leicester City. It is game Sunderland really need to win. But even the mighty boost to morale that a victory would bring would then subside if we went to Swansea a week later and fell to fellow strugglers. With that in mind, a new writer to us, Rachel Johnson*, looks at what the experts are making of that trip to South Wales …
Monsieur Salut writes: Tim Burke* has Millwall connections and should perhaps be wearing a ‘you all hate us, we don’t care’ T-shirt. Instead, he fell in love with the Foxes after moving to Leicester and much of the footballing world fell in love with his adopted team in May. It was a season he enjoyed for a reason never experienced by a Sunderland supporter who was not alive in 1936. This season? Tim’s happy, even if tongue in cheek, to avoid the drop . Great attitude and great replies – and maybe he can take heart from Sunderland’s history; we won the FA Cup in the season following our last top flight title …
It came out of the blue. A message from a Twitter user plugging Heristage, ‘the only French-language site dedicated to English football’. The message directed me to a long and superbly detailed analysis (in French but at this link) of Sunderland AFC’s ‘Bank of England’ era, that period of the 1950s that older supporters identify as the trigger for our decline.
Heristage turned out to be the work of Rémi Carlu*, a young, half-French/half-English lover of the game as played here, the country of his mother. He’s currently studying back in the UK and happily agreed to explain himself. Rémi doesn’t support Sunderland – he favours Chelsea (mmm…) – but cares enough about his chosen project to have researched us thoroughly; he also thinks, I’m afraid, that we should accept relegation in return for rebuild …
But all his views are fascinating, all the more so coming from a semi-outsider. I commend this to you as a great read …
Two good wins followed by a logical defeat at Anfield after we’d held out well for 75 minutes and even had two good chances to go ahead.
The positive way to look at our last three games is not to think in terms of two-steps-forward-one-back but to see each of them offering signs that we can break free of the bottom three.
Monsieur Salut writes: on reflection, I regretted that publication of a piece of levity prepared for Salut! Sunderland – Shaun Best on his groundhopping visit to the Stadium of Light – should coincide with the terrible news that a plane carrying 81 people, including players and officials of the Brazilian top-flight side ACF, or Associação Chapecoense de Futebol, had crashed in Colombia. Only six people survived. The human impact of any fatal air crash in enormous; the impact of this disaster on football, and not just in South America, is devastating.
The echoes of Manchester United, Munich and 1958 are inescapable. Shaun, the writer of the groundhopping piece, is a Man Utd supporter. As at Munich, great or greatly promising players, officials and accompanying journalists are among the victims. There are players who survived – just three according to the last report I saw – and there is, as in Munich, the story of at least one pulled alive from wreckage but dying soon afterwards.
As a further tribute to all those who perished, and to Chapecoense, a side with much of the the romantic appeal of the Busby Babes, I reproduce a piece I wrote for ESPN FC ahead of a Sunderland game against Man Utd three years ago ….
NB: what follows is a light-hearted read on what is otherwise a grim day for football. Salut! Sunderland declares its sympathy for all those killed in or bereaved by the Colombian air crash, whose victims include players and officials of the Brazilian top flight club ACF, or Associação Chapecoense de Futebol. As a Manchester Utd supporter, our guest writer will be well aware of his own club’s association with aviation disaster.
There are train spotters, bird twitchers and philatelists. And then there’s the Club of 72, whose members collect football stadiums, not to dismantle and take home but to visit. As Shaun Best – already familiar with the 72 Football League grounds – prepared to tick Sunderland off his to-do list, he was wondering who would be the manager by the time got there. We were winless and seemingly broken beyond repair. Then a funny thing happened: we won a game. Let Shaun take up the story of his newest collector’s item, the Stadium of Light …
I think the last match I got to was the same fixture in February, when we came back from 2-0 down to get a draw, thanks to Jermain Defoe and the now disgraced Adam Johnson. Johnson had come on as sub for Jan Kirchoff, another of the eight who were on the team sheet in February but missing from it this time around.
